Ian, Debs will need a huge amount of support when the physio starts, when i was having my broken arm pinned a while ago there was a guy having his knee fixed he was up and walking the following morning after the op, they like to get the limb moving asap before it starts seizing up.
it'll work again but it needs slow hard dedication which you two will have buckets loads of, Peter
Good point, Peter. I marbled (the medics' term when they saw the x-ray!) my left kneecap in 1992. The operation to put a figure-8 wire in was trivial compared to Deb's experience, and they had the knee moving again within 24 hrs. Deb has now gone more than two weeks since her knee was rebuilt - I know how hard it will be to get the knee to respond at all! Pointing her toes, which I found impossible, even after such a short period of inactivity, will be like climbing Everest - sans oxygen! Anyway, today she gets the laptop and a pile of DVDs - the DVD player itself turns out to be defunct (that's the printable version of the term I used when I tried it) - great cracks in the display when I turned it on. Now I need to convince MAAF to buy us another!
I guess the "near-death experience thing" is drawing to a close when you're in physio for your knee and watching DVDs in bed on your laptop. What with the seemingly ceasless crap news on here just now, I reckon it's an opportune time for a laugh, and so I'll tell you about Steve Zarse's - AKA The Gimp - Le Mans near-death experience.
The monday after Le Mans one year we pitched up on the Riva Bella beach at Ouisteham to kill time whilst waiting for the 23.00 crossing. We lit a BBQ, got pissed right up on beer and vodka Red Bulls and played 7-a-side rugby even though there was only six of us. Steve being a braggard decided he would take on the other five of us. To say the scrum was a a bit of a mismatch is an understatement, he went down like a house of cards. He sort of buckled backwards as we ran over him, with his legs sticking out behind him. His head got bent backwards so that the back of his bonce seemed to be nestling between his buttocks. You could hear things inside his body snapping under the pressure and as we moved away he just lay there motionless, gurgling on the floor.
Cut a long story short, the ambulance people put his head in a brace and then gently placed him into an inflatable stretcher which he suck into and then they blew up to locked him motionless to prevent spinal damage. They hooked him up to some monitors and whipped him off to hospital. I travelled in the ambulance with his brother Matt. His heartbeat and blood pressure started falling and I read out the declining numbers to him. Eventually, I said, "Steve mate, I don't want to worry you but your BP's falling fast the heart beat is weakening and you're about to flat line. Please don't die on us". This somewhat alarming news must have created a surge of adrenalin, as things suddenly shot back up on the monitor as the fear of his imminent demise caused his heart to race to 120bpm and his BP to sky rocket.
A bit later in the journey Steve complained that he couldn't feel his arms and legs. His brother held his hand and quietly whispered in his ear, expalining that this was due to his spinal cord being severed and that he was now a paraplegic and it meant he would never walk again, nor be able to make love to his wife. Steve began quietly sobbing.
In fact, on the beach the paramedic girl (with cracking knockers) had already explained to us in French that they were quite sure there was nothing wrong with him except a few pulled muscles, that the trip to the hospital was a mere precaution and the numbness was simply the inflatable stretcher cutting off the blood to his fingers and toes. But we were buggered if we were going to tell Steve that if it meant we could torment him for a few minutes about spending the rest of his life paralysed in a wheel chair, typing on the internet with one of those prongs with a cork on attached to his head.
Once at the hospital he was given a quick check-up and released clutching a massive 25mg valium pill. I offered him a beaker of water and he swallowed it down. Of course, this being France, it was a suppository intended for anal consumption and in no time he was compaining about seeing dragons everywhere and was vomitting in the back of a brand new Peugeot 605 taxi.
Aren't drunken mates great eh?
