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