A shattered femur - a good ending to the weekend

I was skiing downhill, at the end of a long weekend of doing the same. I was on the flattest part of the easiest run on Mount Washington. Having skied for years, I was fairly experienced for a child of only eleven, swerving as I was from side to side downslope in order to slow myself slightly. My mother was keeping even with me, and carrying out the same side-to-side movement. I had a momentary lapse in attention, and ran into her. I was startled by this, but not overly worried until I tried to pull away, only to discover that I could not. I would like to say that I handled it well, dealing with the situation with a mixture of calmness and grace.
I didn’t. What I did do was panic. Intensely. I wrenched my right ski free of her left, and lurched over to my left side. When the spot was later inspected, a large chunk was taken out of a particularly tough lump of snow. That chunk was from my ski, which at this moment, dug the tip firmly into that lump of snow. The tip of my ski stopped, but I kept moving. As I continued forwards, my leg twisted to the left, more and more so. Around the point where I was even with the tip, I suspect, my leg shattered into razor-sharp fragments. My ski flew off, the bindings having failed one of their two jobs, and I was left with only the literally blinding pain of a shattered femur.
Not just broken, shattered. Destroyed. Eviscerated. Rent into shards of sheer agony. For the first few seconds (which felt like hours), I literally could not see. Everything was bleached to the uniform white of pain. When my vision returned, other functions did not. For ten or twenty seconds, I could not breathe for the pain, and I could not think for longer still. When I began to think, and took my first breath, it immediately turned about and rushed back into the world as a drawn out cry of agony. There were no words, not even coherent sounds, just a noise of intense and unbearable pain. Following this, I began yelling about the pain, how it hurt, how my leg hurt and what had happened and what was going on and oh, oh damn how it hurt.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. Not for want of a macho ideal, but because this was suffering beyond tears. There were not tears enough in the entire world to express this agony in truth. I was distantly aware that someone else had joined us, a first aider I later learned, but for the moment, this was not part of the world. It was somewhere else, some other universe, and my universe was pain. My entire awareness was of the hurt, and pain, and agony, and anguish, and suffering that I felt.
A snowmobile joined us, with a first aid team. They loaded me onto the sled behind the snowmobile, and I lay there, in pain, and let them.
They brought me to a first aid shack. The first thing I noticed was a man moaning in the corner. I later found out that he had broken ribs. They gave my Demerol for the pain, which was wrong. I wish that it had been Morphine. Demerol doesn’t take away your pain, it just makes you not care that it’s there. It still hurt, I just didn’t care as much. My father, standing nearby, asked me how the pain was. I replied with “Painful, dad,” and he lightly punched me in the arm, saying “Smartypants,” and smiling. He asked me seriously, and I told him. I told him that it hurt, and the injection hadn’t really made it better. He asked me what I meant exactly, so I told him. “It still hurts, dad, it just seems more distant, or like it’s not as much of a concern right now. It still hurts, though.” My father began talking to the medic, and soon became enraged. Apparently, Demerol is off-limits to people under sixteen, for various reasons. I was eleven. The medic had also given me a dose so small that it had essentially no effect.
The medic offered to give me some morphine, but there was a risk that the morphine and Demerol would have reacted and stopped my heart. I said I could deal with the pain.
I watched them examine me. I watched them cut the sock off of my right foot, and pull the sock off of my left foot, the one on the broken leg. I watched them cut off my new ski-pants, and my shirt. I asked them why they were cutting my shirt off, but I guess nobody heard me. They had hooked me up to a few machines, and now one of them switched from a steady (-ish) beeping to one long, continuous bleep. The medic came over and looked at me. That machine was my heart-rate monitor. The bleep meant no heartbeat. The medic took my wrist, tried to find a pulse, failed and tried again on my carotid artery, in my neck. He looked around, and said, “No pulse.”
I looked up at him and said “That’s bad, right?” to which he had no reply. Instead, he got a stethoscope, and listened to my chest. He told us that he could hear my heart, but it sounded weak. He tried to take my blood pressure, but it was so weak that the machine wouldn’t register it.
I was technically dead.
A while later - I don’t know how long, because time spent suffering stretches long and thin indeed – but some time later certainly, an ambulance was summoned. Upon hearing of my condition, the driver denied taking me. He told the medic “It’s a two or three hour drive over bumpy mountain roads, and that boy’s leg is full of razor sharp shards of bone, right next to the largest artery in the body. One of those fragments nicks his femoral artery, and he’ll bleed to death internally inside of ten minutes.” The ambulance driver had been a doctor for six years, and then a surgeon for twelve, before becoming a driver. The medic bowed to his superior knowledge (thankfully for me), and instead called a helicopter med-evac. I was quite interested in all things air-bound, so I quite enjoyed the approach of the helicopter, however the ride was less enjoyable. The window was at my eye level, so all I could see was the sky.
Once in the Comox hospital, the first thing I did was wave to a concerned-looking elderly couple in the emergency room, assuring them that I would be fine. I also recognized the broken ribs man from the aid shack, and said hello. I cannot remember if he replied. I was sent into a room, X-rays were taken. I was hooked up to an I.V. I asked a passing nurse for a drink, but she said that I couldn’t, but I could have what they called a “swab”. They came in either lemon or mint, and were basically a large Q-tip soaked in juice. I liked the lemons.
I told my dad that the pain was getting worse, rapidly. He asked me what it was from one to ten. I said seventeen thousand. He chuckled, and then said “seriously, though…” I responded with “Seriously? Twelve.” And I said it in such a way that he knew it was not a joke. He put his hand on my knee and pulled slightly downwards away from my torso. I gasped with relief, it was the best feeling I have ever experienced. Imagine someone slowly twisting and grinding a knife around inside of your thigh for hours on end, and then the feeling when it was removed. Multiply that by a lot and you’d be close to how good this felt.
Eventually, when all of my X-rays for the time had been taken, a nurse put my leg in a splint that attached to the foot and waist, and stretched the two apart, just as my dad had been doing. It felt very good. It had been more than nine hours since my leg had been broken.
I was sent, eventually, to Victoria General Hospital, once more via helicopter. The only difference view-wise was that the sky was now dark. Once there, they brought me to the room. On the way, my left foot flopped over so my toes were over the edge of the gurney. Fearing that they might hit something, I instinctively tried to rotate my foot back to a vertical position, but failed. Instead, I felt the stunted, broken nub of my femur rotating inside of the tube of muscles that was my thigh. There was no resistance whatsoever. It was simultaneously a fascinating sensation, and a sickening one. Thinking about what was happening in visual terms made my stomach turn.
Once I was in my room, I was hooked to an I.V. stand, one I would remain attached to for the next several days. I watched a movie with my family, James and the Giant Peach, then asked for some toast. When I got it, I tried to eat it, but after one bite it was intensely clear that that was not going to happen. My mom and sister went home, and my dad stayed with me. Eventually, I fell asleep.
I woke up in pain and discomfort. I looked down, and noticed that the splint had been disconnected in the night. I woke up my dad, and he fixed it. Later that day, I went into the prep room for the surgery I was going to have. Someone came over and began talking to me. Before he started, I asked if he was the surgeon. He said no, and I said that I wanted to talk to the man who would soon be slicing open my leg. The surgeon came over soon, and began writing on my right leg. I looked down, and said ``Uh, wrong leg doc…” He lifted my knee to show me what he had written. “Not this leg”. I laughed, and so did he. They used a flexible drill bit the length of my arm to drill through the shards of bone in my leg, and then inserted two foot-long titanium-elastic rods into the holes they had drilled.
The next days passed with an agonizing slowness I would not care to recount at this time. Some few events stand out, however. The first time I stood up in three days, going into a wheelchair, and spending half an hour semi-conscious because of the lack of blood to my brain, like a massive head rush. Getting “Get well soon” cards from my classmates. Being visited by relatives. The day they gave me back the boxers I had been wearing when my leg was broken. Giving me my sliced up shirt. Clear fluids diet for days, nothing allowed but water, ginger ale, and popsicles.
When I returned home after five days in the hospital, I still had no appetite, and spent the next few days doing little but sleeping and lying in my bed. It hurt to move anywhere else, so I stayed there. By the end of the week, every book we owned that held interest to me was stacked, fully read, next to my bed, in three stacks about two feet high each. I had dropped from a skinny one hundred one pounds to an emaciated seventy-two. I had been so glad at breaking a hundred, a feat I would not again accomplish for many months.
I spent one month at home, and the first two (plus a few days) in a wheelchair. Afterwards, I moved on to crutches for six months. However, neither of these ended the pain. Once, in class, a passerby bumped the release on the leg rest on my wheelchair, which was holding my left leg up. Gravity pulled it downward, and I drew blood biting my lip to keep from screaming. I used my other leg to lift the rest into a proper position, re-set the catch, and excused my self to the washroom, where I moaned and exhaled hard for a few minutes to dissipate some of the pain.
While on crutches, we once went out to dinner as a family. Driving home, I thought little of the rain outside. When I stepped into my house, the water on my crutches made them slip on the linoleum floor, sliding away from me. My full weight landed on my broken leg. The bone fragments twisted and grated inside of my leg as the titanium rods warped and bent. It was the most sickening thing I have felt, to have your bone bending inside of you. The same thing happened the next week when exiting the shower. It was not one of those things that gets better with time.
About four or five months after the surgery, I began sleeping less and less, and my knee was hurting more and more, but only on the inside. Meanwhile, a bump was developing, seeming to be the source of my pain. I was taken once more to the hospital where they discovered through X-ray that one of the rods in my leg was long. It was slowly slicing through my knee from the inside, working its way to the surface of my skin, and neatly dividing everything in its path in half.
Another surgery was carried out, and a little less than an inch was taken off of the end of the rod. When I came to, the gave me the piece of rod in a plastic container. I opened it, took out the rod, and said “So that’s the bastard…” quoting a line from a movie I can no longer remember. I went home, putting the container and rod piece on top of my bedside shelves, where it resides even today.
A year and four moths after I broke my leg, I was called in for the final surgery. They took out the rods. When I woke up, the nurse there gave me a grape popsicle, and the rods from my leg. I ate the popsicle, and took the rods home. I attended physiotherapy sessions for a long time afterwards, which often hurt, but I gave it my all because I was determined to function fully.
Several months after the rods had been removed, I was walking to the bus after school, and I felt a bizarre twang from inside of my left knee. It started swelling. By the time my dad drove me to the hospital, it was larger than my head. In the emergency room, 300 millilitres of blood was sucked from my leg with a needle the size of a small straw. I’d estimate that it was about a millimetre in diameter, the actual needles itself. My knee was still swollen, but not to the point of pain, which had been excruciating.
My leg still hurts sometimes, if I walk a lot. There’s no feeling in the sides, and one of the tendons is overly taught. There is a lump on the side of the bone which you can feel through my thigh muscle. There is a small piece of rod in a container on my shelves next to the rods themselves.
That’s all that’s left.