How was my trip, you ask?

Weellll, I spent the last five days in the hospital. I can tell you that the Hilo Medical Center in Hilo, Hawaii is very nice!

I fractured, last Monday, my left "tibial plateau" (essentially part of the knee joint) quite badly. A wave knocked me over as I was walking into the water - which shouldn't have been a problem, and it was just a fluke that I fell the way I did and broke it. I went to the hospital the next day (it didn't seem bad enough right then, and only became grotesquely swollen, and me unable to walk, that evening). Spent 12 hours in emergency, then was admitted that night. Told by the orthopaedic surgeon that it should be operated on - a fairly major and complicated operation that would involve putting pins and plates and all that stuff in my knee, and yet would still probably result in me having arthritis or some mobility restrictions. Good times. So the doctor was at first going to operate on me there, but then was quite strongly advocating that I go home to have it done, so that the same doc who operated on me could follow up with me, because of the strong possibiblity of problems with the surgery and outcome.

So I stayed in the hospital, with myself calling my OB/GYN in Scary City (the only doc I really have here) pleading with him to find me an Orthopaedic surgeon who would admit me into the hospital. The hospital people were arranging with my travel insurance to get me home. Meanwhile I hung out in hospital, transported around by wheelchair and then later by walker and then by crutches. We weren't able to leave until Saturday night. The insurance had booked R and I into first class flights so I had more room as was not able to bend leg. These flights - overnight, red-eye - were a horror because the folks at the hospital in Hawaii had struck mortal fear into me by consistently warning me about the possibility of dying of a blood clot on the way home, because of having been lying down for so many days before. I had been given daily injections of anti-clot stuff, but I was still terrified. R said I seemed so worked up on the plane that I was going to give myself a heart attack. And then I was also having some sort of awful reaction to the meds I was on for pain. God, the traveling was the worst part of the whole thing.

Then yesterday morning - Sunday - I arrived back in Scary City and was escorted straight to the hospital, where I was admitted into a horrifying ward that I have named the Dickensian Ward. It was so noisy and chaotic and disturbing and smelled liked pee, and I was shocked. (Thankfully I was transferred when a semi-private room became available in the evening.) The Orthopaedic surgeon on call right now had agreed to take me on. I met with him yesterday and then again this morning, when he discharged me. After looking at the x-rays and MRI, he doesn't feel that the extremely complex surgery is worth it. Thinks I can probably heal almost as well (read, not fully, but mostly) without doing it. So here I am. At home, on crutches for weeks more. R is here for the week (she had to take an extra week off work in Home City, which I feel bad about), and then my mother insisted on booking herself a ticked to come here for five days, and then my father for a week. By then, I should think I'll be in pretty good shape, though probably still on crutches.

So, yeah. That was Hawaii. It was great up till this happened. And I was supposed to leave for Home City this Wednesday, for seven weeks. Now I can't. Now I'm here for at least three more weeks. There goes my long summer with R, which we really need because we are on tenterhooks.

Really, it is so ridiculous I could almost laugh. I've had more health/medical problems in the last twelve months than I've had in my whole life, it feels like!!

Anyway, will now go to start checking out your 145 posts in Bloglines - good reading for an invalid!!