ortho visit and radio show

late sunday night / early monday morning i sent an email to my managers at work telling them i wouldn’t be able to come in due to my leg not being able to handle more than 2 or 3 hours of me being upright/sitting. i also told them about the problems i was having trying to get an orthopod’s office to take my personal health insurance, but that i was contacting the work h.r. department to see if they could help me.
monday during the day i called the person in h.r. i’d been given the name and number of on friday, and i explained the situation. she said she’d call her contact at the insurance company and see what could be done.
sue and her two daughters picked me up for lunch and we went to chick-fil-a. i was a little nervous with the plethora of excited kids running around, but it went okay. sue dropped me off at home and then went by petsmart and picked up some cat food for me. for which i’m sure lenin is most appreciative, even though she doesn’t know it.
an hour or two later i got a call from my departmental manager saying he’d explained the situation to his boss, and he suggested i try getting in touch with some of the places that are related to the company i work for. (i work in the medical center, don’t you know.) they gave me some names and numbers, so i called an ortho office and explained things and they said they take personal insurance for vehicle accidents. yea! so i made an appointment for tuesday morning.
monday night i watched some pbs and ate a container of tropical fruit the hrc and mini-hrc had brought over for me the day before. i then took a shower in preparation for the next day (showers aren’t quite as simple as they used to be) and went to bed.
tuesday a co-worker came by around 10am to pick me up and take me to my appointment. he drives an rx-8, which is a rather tight fit. but i am thoroughly appreciative of him taking the time to help me. i told him he could just drop me off, but he offered to stay with me. after waiting a long time in the waiting room, they took me back. they took me and did more x-rays on me, quite a few more than the e.r. had done, and several involved me being in pretty uncomfortable angles with weight on my left leg. (like standing on a stool on my tip-toes and bending and leaning my knees forward until they leaned against the x-ray board. and holding there. ouch.) that done, i went back to the exam room and waited for the doctor. he came in and asked me what had happened, then he proceeded to wiggle and bend and stretch my knee and leg. he said he couldn’t see there was any ligament damage, but to schedule another appointment for 3 weeks to let the swelling and such get back to normal and see if he missed anything. he said i had what they refer to in the business as a “crush injury”. (technical mumbo-jumbo!) basically no broken bones and little or no external skin lacerations, just everything between the bone and outer skin gets…well…crushed. broken blood vessels and capillaries, messed up nerves, squished muscle tissue, etc. he said there isn’t much they can do to make it heal faster or anything, you just have to wait it out. i asked him if he could give any kind of estimate when i should be able to go back to work, and he said that was pretty much just up to me and when i felt like it, since time to heal varies a lot. he asked if i had crutches, and said i should probably use at least one to get some pressure off the leg, but that it’s good that i was moving around some and bending it and straightening it out. he also mentioned i might want to switch from ibuprofen to tylenol since ibuprofen thins the blood and may cause more internal bleeding. so on one hand it was comforting to confirm no broken bones and have someone with lots of knee and ankle experience say things looked intact — on the other hand, i really didn’t gain much new knowledge about how to deal with things, what i could expect, or how long it might take. the doctor left and the nurse came back in and asked if i needed a doctor’s excuse for work. i said work had been pretty understanding, but i guessed i should get one just to cover my bases. she asked for how long and i said i didn’t know, so she made it for the 3 weeks until my follow-up appointment. i told her that was fine and i could always cut it short if i felt better before then.
i left the office and as we were getting ready to leave the parking garage i asked my co-worker if he wanted to go ahead and have lunch since it was already like 12:30pm or 1pm or something. we used to work in the area, but moved a couple of years ago, so i asked him if he wanted to eat at miller’s. it was good, but by this point i’d been standing or sitting for 3 or so hours so my leg was starting to hurt pretty badly. i took half of my food and got a to-go back and we left. (evidently he joked later to a co-worker that he knew i was hurt because i only ate half my food and took the rest to go.) he dropped me off back at my house and i climbed into bed.
tuesday afternoon while in bed i watched bottle shock through netflix’s instant watch on my mac laptop. it was an interesting story. overall it was nothing great as far as films go, but i enjoyed watching it since i learned a bit of (probably semi-true, manipulated) history about napa valley and its place in the wine world, and wine-making. i’m also beginning to think i’m not sure i can appreciate streamed movies. once the pipe gets fat enough that good quality pictures can be sent to decent sized screens (and/or they can cache enough of it locally) it should be okay, but i think i care too much about the image of most films i’m interested in to feel satisfied with the current video quality i’m able to see. still, it’s kind of nice in a pinch to have a wide selection of on-demand films to watch.
in the evening, jack came by with all of his children and we went to chuy’s. i was there for a couple of hours, and by the end my leg (especially my knee) was hurting pretty badly. i think being up twice in the same day for 2 or 3 hours each time, mixed with the walking around and x-ray bends i did at the doctor’s visit and lunch, was a bit too much. i checked my medicine cabinet and i had 3 extra-strength tylenol geltabs that expired in 2007. i took two of them and laid in bed. it took quite a while for my leg to not hurt too much.
wednesday for lunch i ate with the whole potts family at le peep. sue stopped by a walgreen’s and picked me up some more ibuprofen and some acetaminophen. i got back home and immediately hopped into bed.
over the last few days my progressive agent and i had been trading voice mail messages. i finally managed to get in touch with her. i made plans for her to come by my place thursday morning.
around 7:15pm i took a couple of the quick-release acetaminophen capsules sue had bought for me. around 7:30pm dwight came by in his mustang and picked me up and took me to kpft for the radio show. jay is not currently in the country, but everyone else was there. i think they all thought my leg looked pretty nasty. i managed to get through the show okay, although it started hurting some more the last 30 minutes or so. on the way home, i got dwight to go through the drive-thru at a jack in the box and i picked up some curly fries and 4 tacos (that’s pronounced like “tack-o” not “tah-co”).