9:30am--after xrays, he said, "you are doing much better than i expected.
it's only been 3 weeks and i can barely see the fracture!"  heheheh--he said
i'm at 6 weeks healing out of 8 weeks expected.  i've been drinking 3 full
glasses a day of lactaid milk fortified with calcium 50% daily value per
serving for the past 3 weeks.  it worked!<smile>  i seem to do much better
with liquid calcium than i do with pills.  think i need to find some liquid
calcium that's less filling though.  wish i knew a good brand/kind.

he was also surprised that i walked in using just my cane, instead of
crutches.  said, "i wanted you off the crutches at around 3 weeks or as soon
as you could tolerate it.  i want a lot of my patients off crutches sooner
rather than later, but rarely see anybody do it.  i didn't expect you to do
it, with all that ligament and tendon damage.  you're doing surprisingly
well!"LOL  i've been working on getting off them for the past two weeks,
despite the owies.  got completely off them for the entire day yesterday,
for the first time.  yessss!  but, boy did i pay for that last night while
trying to sleep!

he said, "aren't you in any pain?  you didn't call for a prescription
refill, did you?  do you have any pain pills left?"  of course, i am, but
it's tolerable during the day.  i explained about yesterday and last night.
and that yes, i was out of pain pills, and have been for a couple of days.
figured i'd be seeing him this morning anyway.  so, he wrote me out a script
saying, "with all the progress you've made, i think you must mainly need
these at night, right?"  yep.

then he said i have a long rehab ahead of me, starting in a week or two.
need to strengthen the tendons and ligs (not exactly what i wanted to
hear.).  he said, "don't let them cause you any immediate pain.  tell them
to stop, if they do and let me know right away if they do.  expect to be in
pain afterwards, though.  call me for pain pills!  you're going to need them
through rehab, because of all the tendon and ligament damage (again, not
exactly what i wanted to hear--that i will be needing pain pills for rehab,
i mean.)."

he said he wants to see me in a month, because he's "curious" about how well
i'll be doing by then.  curious?  that's the first time i've had an ortho
want me to have an appointment just because he's curious.  strange, that,
eh?

anyway, some good news and some new challenges ahead.  i'm off to costco to
get the pain pills.

kate