More Tibia Trivia

It might be illegal but this morning, using my phone, I snapped this shot of the three X-rays of my wife's ankle. The doctor wasn’t around at the time. The X-rays clearly show the plate and various screws needed to get her ankle back together again.

In image one and two the plate and seven screws holding together the fibula are obvious. Apparently the damage was somewhat greater than the original X-ray showed and so a further screw had to be added between screws 3 & 4 of the plate (counting from the top). That screw is holding the bone together horizontally.

Lastly, all of the images show the two large screws keeping the pieces of the tibia together.

This all stays in place forever now - so wish us luck when we next get to go through an airport.

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Bazza

Tibia Trivia

The ankle is a joint where the foot meets the leg. It consists of the bones of the leg - the fibula and its larger neighbour the tibia - and the top foot bone part called the talus. The fibula and tibia run between the knee and the ankle. If you were to cause a fracture to the one of these bones anywhere from the knee to about three quarters down, you would be considered as having broken a leg. If the break, in either or both of these fine bones, happens in the general area of the top of the foot then you have broken your ankle. To break either the fibula or tibia is bad, to break both is worse.

This is a picture of a clearly broken fibula and, less obviously broken tibia (it is two images of the same foot). The bones in the X-ray belong to my wife and that is why I now know more about the bone structure of the lower extremities than I did last Friday morning. Those same bones are also the reason I did not post a blog last week.

We were attending the wedding of some good friends out at a ski resort in Colorado. My wife went out a week early to be a helping hand and I flew out Friday morning looking forward to a hug after a tough week, which was spent alone.

Unfortunately Mother Nature had other plans for us and on Thursday night dumped a ton of snow in the mountains between Denver and Vail and mixed it up with swirling 60+ MPH winds. Consequently when I landed in Denver the first phone call I got was my wife telling me that a 40 mile stretch of the the I70 was shut. Luckily the next call was from our friends Keith and Marianne who were also waiting for the road to open. After a little bit chris-crossing each other we managed to meet up at the Red Rocks concert venue. From there we went into nearby Morristown for lunch and to wait for the avalanche exploders and snow plows to do their work and reopen the interstate. It was while eating lunch I got the call, from my wife, that started with the phrase:
“I don’t want you to freak out but …”

Fortunately, the road reopened as we finished lunch and my little, two wheel drive, Chevy Cobalt - who’s only saving grace was the aux connector for my iPod, slipped and slid the four thousand vertical feet and forty horizontal miles to my wife and the various pieces of her ankle. Turns out she had slipped in a snow-packed car park and fallen awkwardly.

Wedding was nice but the all the other plans for the weekend were shot. I had sketched out six (yes 6!!) blogs on the plane but did not get time for finishing or posting. We made it back to Connecticut and have since had the ankle plated and pinned

So friends know you know what a tibia and fibula look like and now you know how they can screw up your blog.


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Bazza

Missing Speedy and Sparky

This morning I sat by the big kitchen window half heartedly picking at a crossword, eating breakfast and looking out at the large grassy bank that runs down to the road. The bank (like so many US banks) is in a poor state. The locals tell me the snow was early this year, then it froze and there have been two or three very heavy rain storms inbewteen it all; so the the bank has taken on a a worn, muddy, threadbare look. As I gazed out the morning frost was being erased by the bright wintry sun and there was a small grey/blue bird perched on the brittle black twigs of a bush but no other sign of life.

I felt like a sailor’s spouse who is constantly drawn to the oceans edge, hopelessly scanning the horizon but knowing it will be weeks before they do catch sight of what they need most.

Last time I saw Speedy and Sparky was towards the end of October. Activity on the grass bank had increased to manic proportions. They seemed to have thrown off the debilitating cloak of caution and could be easily spotted madly dashing here and there as nature rained down manna from the trees. Other chipmunks and a number of grey squirrels had also appeared in this Sciuridae equivalent of Mardi Gras – and then a few days later they were all gone.

I know chipmunks go into torpor in the winter (who doesn’t go into torpor?) but I guess I had hoped it would still allow them the occasional above ground visit. Let’s hope those last few weeks allowed them to stock up enough to get through to late March.

Stay warm


Bazza