Ever since I was born, I have had to deal with cerebral palsy. This is a movement disorder which impairs
motor skills and sometimes speech. It is
caused by damage to the brain. In my
case, the cerebral palsy causes me to walk on my left toe (instead of heel first)
and avoid bearing weight on my left side. In February of 2014, I had surgery that helped
to fix my gait. We had considered this
surgery for several months and had finally decided to go ahead with it. The surgical procedure was as follows: The surgeon would slice my leg open, saw my femur
in two, rotate it, and reattach it with a plate and screws. He would also lengthen my left calf and
hamstring muscles. The surgery was to
take place at Cincinnati Children's hospital.
The day
before the surgery, my parents drove me down to Cincinnati .
I was not supposed to eat after 9:00 p.m., or drink after 3:00 a.m. The surgery was to start between 7:00 and 8:00
the next morning. That night none of us
slept very well because we were anticipating it.
We got up
at about 4:00 a.m. and headed over to the hospital. After I waited for a little while, a nurse came
in and helped me to prepare for the surgery.
I put on a hospital gown and waited.
Soon, it was time. I said good-bye
to my parents and then another nurse wheeled my bed into the operating
room. I climbed onto the operating
table. The doctors gave me laughing gas
to help calm me down, and then one of them said: "There's going to be a
little poke." I felt the little
poke, and soon after that didn't remember anything else for a good long while.
When I woke
up, I was lying in a hospital bed with both legs immobilized. I tapped on the hard, red cast with my
hand: It extended from my left hip all
the way down to my toes. I then thought
to myself: "Why can't I move my
right knee? The doctor was only supposed
to operate on my left leg." For
some reason, both of my legs were immobilized.
I heard my parents' voices asking me how I was doing. They told me the doctor had found that my
right hamstring was quite tight, so he had lengthened it during the
surgery. Within the first half hour of
my awakening, when I was still having trouble talking, I managed to croak
: "What's for dinner?" This is one of my all-time favorite questions
to ask my mom most days.
I felt
quite sleepy and drugged from the anesthesia, and I also still had an epidural
in my back: This was a small needle
which fed medicine into my spinal cord to stop the pain. The medicine numbed everything from the
needle to partway down my legs. This
meant that I had to have a catheter put in.
Luckily, the doctors did this while I was asleep. Once I had regained consciousness, a nurse
wheeled me down to a hospital room, and I rested there for a while. I had to eat ice chips before I was allowed to
eat anything more filling. After a full six
hours of eating nothing but ice chips, I was quite hungry and ready for
something more substantial. However, they
still wouldn't allow normal food. All I
could eat was Jell-O. After eating a few
cups of Jell-O I was almost ready for bed.
Finally, the nurse said that I could eat real food, so we ordered a
dinner roll and a muffin (which was basically a cupcake). I ate the roll and saved the cupcake for the
next day.
The next
morning, I ordered an omelet for breakfast.
This omelet had ham, cheese, green peppers, and onions inside of
it. It was the ham that I enjoyed the
most. I enjoyed it so much that after I
got home, my dad challenged himself to make an omelet that I thought was better
than the "hospital omelet."
After breakfast each day, a team of people in white suits came in to ask
me how my pain was. I always said that
it wasn't terrible. The pain team, and
other doctors and nurses, commented on my stuffed crocodile peeking out from
under the sheets. My six-year-old sister
had sent her favorite stuffed animal along to help comfort me during the
surgery. It was a very generous gift.
One time,
the nurse gave me some morphine for pain.
After a few minutes, I began to feel very drugged and loopy. It was about this time that someone helped me
onto a bedside commode so that I could try to go to the bathroom. This did not go very well, because I felt so
drugged that I just wanted to go to sleep.
Another time, my sheets suddenly felt very wet. We discovered that my catheter tubing had come
unhooked. My cast could get wet! My room suddenly filled with nurses who scrambled
to reattach the tubing. As they said,
catheter tubing usually never came unhooked, but mine somehow did. Instead of the cast, my knee immobilizer got
wet. The nurses did not give me a new
knee immobilizer; they just let the existing one dry.
I hated
wearing the knee immobilizer, especially at night. I had to wear it to keep my muscles stretched
out. It was uncomfortable, and quite
restrictive. The knee immobilizer was a black
piece of fabric that wrapped around my leg.
Ten Velcro straps held my leg against metal strips inside of it. I had to wear one knee immobilizer (and
sometimes two) most nights for almost a year after my surgery.
One day at
the hospital a physical therapist helped me to get out of the bed and stand up
for the first time after my surgery. Standing
up made my leg hurt, and made me feel lightheaded. The physical therapist once again helped me
to get onto the bedside commode. I had a
lot of trouble getting back onto the bed, so much trouble that I cried. The day before I went home, I was able to get
into a wheelchair and go to a playroom.
I played video games for a while there, and then I went back to my room.
The day
that I went home, my dad had to lay a plastic crate between the middle seats of
our van so that I could lay my legs across them. When we got home, there was a big sign across
the garage door which said "Welcome Home." My siblings and grandparents had made it. My dad pushed my wheelchair into the house
and the rehab began. I have gone through
a lot, but it has been worth it.
- D.E. Frangipani
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