Being a full account of the injuries of Ms C Hurley
March 17, 2012
Somehow it has taken me six weeks to get back to the writing of this post. I think perhaps that might be indicative of something psychological, don't you? What on earth could possibly be problematic about explaining the injuries that have left me permanently scarred, with a fucked up leg and at present, deep, nasty pains which won't go for months, if not years?
Here's the executive summary:
- Deep laceration to left buttock
- Bruising, hematoma and raw (no skin) patch above the left knee / around the knee
- The biggie part 1) 'degloving' as it is politely termed, below the knee. Skin loss, flesh loss - the works
- ... leading to part 2, the rebuilt ankle
- Right leg from the top! 2 graft sites on the thigh
- ...and a whopping great scar where I had a skin patch, 'flesh' and what is euphemistically known as a 'working blood vessel' removed in order to rebuild the ankle.
- Below the knee, I'd forgotten now, a bunch of bruises on the outside.
Would you like detail? Why certainly.
1. Left buttock
How awkward, to have to wrote the word 'buttock'. While I was on the floor under the lorry, the lovely woman who looked after me said "I have to tell you, I can see some of your fat cells on your bum", at which I asked her not to tell me anything else. I cannot begin to imagine how this happened, but this injury was a deep cut, which was relatively small on the surface. How deep? An inch or two, maybe? I don't know but what I do know is that it caused a lot of hard scar tissue (known as hematoma) which is still there, three months later. It was the injury that everyone forgot about. After all, comparatively boring compared to the groovy plastics challenge of saving my foot. But I would not be lying if I said it's one of my most irritating injuries. It gave me dreadful stitch when I first started walking; if I sit too long in one position, deep bruised hurt flares up.
2. I need to break the above the knee injuries down a little bit.
The red portion shows the deep bruising that's all over the area - as the rest of my leg has become less swollen, it has left a large amount of 'numb' with sort of deep swelling that won't go away (I assume for an absolute age), which surrounds my knee. There's actually a swelling on the outside of the knee, just below, which when it really swells, looks somewhat egg-like.
The grey portion shows the hematoma. Which is horrible, to be frank. It swells out way further than the natural shape of my thigh, it's numb and feels like clay. Heavy. As if someone had inserted a sugar bag sized lump of clay on the inside. Toward the end of the day, gravity starts to pull it down. Hurty, obviously but more than that. Extremely uncomfortable. And it's not going away any time soon.
The 'raw' patch was a skin laceration which was rather odd, in that when I first saw it, it was very heavily bruised skin. Utterly nasty to look at - deep, rich, dark purple blood had inundated the skin. It didn't look much like skin, frankly but that's what I was told. Later, I was told that it was an open patch, which made more sense looking at the visual evidence. It was (and still is) completely numb so it hurt no more or less either way. It did heal, and grow more skin fantastically well over a couple of months and now has a thick scar which is a patch a little bigger than a 50p piece. Like all scars, it will take some years to resolve itself in to its long-term 'look and feel'. At present it looks shiny, lumpy and dark red. Just the way the boys like it.
...part 2 coming tomorrow: the feature presentation. Looking forward to that, I'm sure.