As mentioned previously, I sprained my ankle last Thursday. Just to be safe, I went to the doctor on Friday, to make sure it wasn’t anything worse. He poked it a little, sent me to get an x-ray, and gave me a prescription for crutches. The x-ray took a while, and the crutch prescription could apparently only be filled at a surgical supply store half an hour away, so I didn’t bother. Saturday, it felt dramatically better, and Sunday it felt better by enough that I was able to take SteelyKid food shopping as usual, after strapping on one of the ankle braces I use playing basketball (having sprained both ankles at various points in the past).<\/p>\n
Yesterday, while I was in the shower, my doctor called and left a message on the machine asking me to call back. By the time I did, he had left for the day. Since whatever he was calling about wasn’t urgent enough to call over the weekend, I figured it was no big deal, and went about my day. When I swung through my office a while later, there was a message from one of the nurses asking me to call right away. Which I did, and spent ten minutes on hold to find out she was busy. So I gave them my cell number (which I’m pretty sure I’ve done before, but whatever), and went about my day.<\/p>\n
A little while later, she called back, and said that the x-ray which had been taken on Friday showed a fracture, and I was being referred to an orthopedist. This was a little surprising, as my ankle felt worlds better, but who am I to argue with medical professionals. I was then handed off to one of the secretaries to make an appointment, who called a few minutes later saying that the local orthopedic practice could see me right away, but I had to go get the x-rays from the imaging center, which involved another ten minutes of sitting in a waiting room. Then I headed down to the orthopedist, with some trepidation, expecting to be put in a cast, and chewed out for not bothering with the crutches over the weekend.<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Instead, the PA came in, poked at my ankle a bit, and said, “Yeah, it’s sprained. Have you sprained it before? Then you already know what you need to do. I’ll look at the x-ray, though.” The orthopedist who came in a few minutes later said exactly the same thing. “It’s much more a sprain than a fracture– there’s just a tiny chip on the end of the fibula.” (The lateral malleolus<\/a>, if you like Latin).<\/p>\n The treatment? Ice, elevation, and strapping it up in an ankle brace more or less like the one I already had. In other words, I should do what I had already been doing. They didn’t even set up a follow-up appointment, just said “If it’s still bugging you in 2-3 weeks, call us, and we’ll look at it again.” The PA recommended a different style of ankle brace for when I start playing hoops again,and they gave me an air cast for it, but it actually provided less support than the $20 lace-up brace I got at Sports Authority a few years back. <\/p>\n The ironic thing about all this was that the whole business probably caused me to spend more<\/em> time on my feet yesterday afternoon than I was going to before they called to tell me the x-ray results. I had been planning to go to Barnes and Noble and work on the NSF grant proposal reviews that were due yesterday (whoops), but instead spent a couple hours running around from one medical office to another.<\/p>\n I guess I can claim some tough guy points on a technicality, since I was, strictly speaking, walking around on a broken ankle for several days, but, really, it was more an annoyance than anything else. And I really would’ve preferred to know this on Friday, rather than Monday…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" As mentioned previously, I sprained my ankle last Thursday. Just to be safe, I went to the doctor on Friday, to make sure it wasn’t anything worse. He poked it a little, sent me to get an x-ray, and gave me a prescription for crutches. The x-ray took a while, and the crutch prescription could… Continue reading Hurry Up and… Do What You Were Doing Already<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"1","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5288","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5288","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5288"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5288\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5288"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5288"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/chadorzel.com\/principles\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5288"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}