2008 Year Review

The past year has been one of weirdness and setbacks. I went from one end of the emotional spectrum to the other. Where to start. I guess the beginning is always a good place.

Well it really starts back in the end of 2007. I came to Andover Village Retirement Center (AVRC) for rehab for my paralysis. I chose here because they have been featured on Discover Health Channel as being equipped for bariatric and I thought since they handle them for rehab and weight loss, that I would get the best rehab chances here. Well things were going good and I even got to being able to get up and stand in the parallel bars for 30 seconds by the time March came. This is also when progress stopped.

I developed nasty wounds on the bottom of my heals and had to stop standing. I developed them from having my feet rest right on the foot pedals with no shoe on because I had an order for no shoes from Hillside when I had the wounds on the back of my ankles. Well, by May I was discharged from therapy because I couldn't stand because of them, and I wasn't making enough progress with the other therapy like the electro shocks and stuff to keep me on.

By June, the wound on my left foot had healed, but my right foot had broken open and had started to tunnel in. It may have done this from the lack of the proper footwear to keep pressure off it, or miss management of the wound by the wound care nurse. At any rate, you could smell the decaying flesh and the whole went all the way to the bone. I ended up in the hospital by the end of July over it. I was on IV antibiotics for it and had to get a gamma scan to see how deep the infection was.

I went back to AVRC, I had a pick line in my arm for the IV that I got three times a day. But it never felt right. It kept hurting from the time I got it in till the third week when it was red and puss and irritated. Here I got a infection in Arm. It was called the super A bug. It is only found in contaminated hospital equipment. It needed 2 IV a day. So I was getting 5 a day for two weeks. Then on top of that, I got to go into the hyperbaric chamber.

Yes, for eight weeks, got to get hauled out of AVRC to go to St Joe's to get put into a tube. Then It was pressurized with oxygen to 3 atmospheres, it was like being 66 feet underwater. It made my ears pop and sometimes gave me a panic attack and have low blood pressure. There were no radios, newspapers, books, video games, nothing was allowed in with you. Because if you create static electricity in a pure oxygen atmosphere and make it spark, it will explode. So all I could do is watch TV. They had one mounted over the tube. I got to watch the stock market crash first, then see a good republican candidate blow it.

Well once my foot was healed and I was out of hyperbarics, it was the second week of November. I got back into therapy with some new goals. One was to have my legs pointing back towards the ceiling. The second was to get me to walk. We'll deal with the second one first.

In order to walk, we were going to install a new plan to put cerebral palsy braces on my knees and ankles and use the hip muscles that were working to swing the legs. This requires a few steps and wounds free feet. Well we may have wait a while for that because I have developed new wounds from goal one.

To get my feet pointing back to the ceiling they got these boots to put on my feet that were made from metal and plastics and padding. Well the pressure on the back of my feet caused me to get two new wounds, one on each posterior heal. So now I have to wait for them to heal in order to start with the braces. Until then they are going to work on crawling on the mat and everything to try to strengthen my hips so I can do it. It sucks.

This has been the year of the wound, and the year of set backs. It is ending though and I reasons to believe that the next year will be better than the last. It has been long and hard, and I hope that the 2009 is better than 2008 and 2007. I am not sure I can take it if it gets any worse. For the up coming year, I hope to lose the catheter, start getting bariatric surgery and be walking come 2010. I hope by this blog next year I'll be able to say, I am home, I'm walking, I'm seeing someone, and life is good. I may have set my goals a little high for what has been my life but we'll see.