afreytes 🇵🇷
I may have said before that I broke my leg in college. Damn near lost my right leg.
"This dude afreytes and his tall tales 🙄"
This one is true. I swear. Wait, no. The other ones are also true... Mostly.
Anyway, broken leg, ruptured ligaments and muscles, but my lower leg got so bent underneath my body that the tendons broke off part of my tibia before they broke as well.
This was a week before starting college.
1/?
afreytes 🇵🇷
I count myself as being extremely fortunate. I didn't lose my leg. For all accounts my father was smack dab middle class (for Puerto Rico which is lower than the states) and I don't know what he had to do to get such a doctor.
But...
I cannot kneel. I have full leg movement. But I just CANNOT kneel.
And so, when the fascists break into my home. And order me to kneel.
I guess I will have to go out swinging. You catch my drift?
afreytes 🇵🇷
the skin so it could escape.
I think it happened twice or thrice more. And then it stopped. That was decades ago.
But sometimes I will scratch my leg and find a particularly hard bit. And wonder if I am still shedding plastic bits.
8/8
afreytes 🇵🇷
I didn't think anymore of it...
Except, like a few months to a year later. While sleeping I felt maybe a mosquito bite. Which made me wake up and slap my leg and it felt weird in the dark.
It felt like a long a far strand of plastic fishing line dangling out of my leg!
I stood up to turn on the light, thinking I somehow had ruptured my leg!
But it was fine, this time the ulcer was very small, this time the pointy end of the stitch had made a pretty small hole in...
7/?
afreytes 🇵🇷
I don't know what I was thinking. Except that I didn't want to have that piece of plastic inside my body.
So I pulled on it.
And I pulled on it. And I could see the wire kinda moving under my skin. But it seemed to be no more than an inch or so. So I just pulled at in until it was completely out. Remarkably little blood.
I found a case to put it in. Didn't even think to wash it.
And the next day, as if by magic, the ulcer started to heal and close back up.
6/?
afreytes 🇵🇷
And out popped a thin strand of plastic.
Not unlike a fishing line. Not unlike at all.
It was one of the stitches. The plastic line knot and all the doctor used to join the skin pieces back up.
So I picked at the strand...
Grabbed it, finally, and started to pull on it...
5/?
afreytes 🇵🇷
With the additional details that these internal stitches werent completely absorbable naturally by the body. Some of it sure. But not all.
So one or two years after the surgery. After being on a wheelchair, and then a walker, and then a cane. After the fisiotherapist rebroke my leg so I regained full leg movement.
I got an ulcer just below the knee under the scarring, still kinda healing skin. Over a couple days the ulcer got broken into a hole.
4/?
afreytes 🇵🇷
But there's a detail I almost always skip. It's kinda gross...
You see I have some pre existing conditions. Because of such conditions. I could maybe bleed out. Or have a scar that could not be esthetically eliminated. Or have a very marked scar. (I still have a scar that runs from above the knee to below halfway my lower leg)
So one of the things about that surgery was the doctor used internal stitches. Under the skin suturing.
3/?
afreytes 🇵🇷
That week, no doctor would see me. Because the expectation was that I would lose my leg.
But, my father, perhaps feeling some way because when I broke my leg he was so drunk he didnt know about it for days. My father got perhaps one of the best athletic orthopedists in the island to see about my leg.
I don't know how long I was under. But when I came to, I had my leg reconstructed. Looking straight even.
All of this I've said before perhaps...
2/?
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