When I wrapped my legs with bandages, my left leg started to hurt from the inside. Next day I used more bandages to wrap it a bit tighter and the pain increased. That pressure may have a positive effect on the swelling and circulation, but for me it caused pain, so I unwrapped them all. That was when I noticed that my skin had all these pressure points and sunken skin.
I lenghten with 120° turns in general, not 90°. The allen key has six sides with six 60° angles each corner. You can not do precise 90° turns, but you can always to accurate 60, 120, 180, ... degree turns. At the beginning I did 480° per day, after reaching a 2cm gap I have only done 240° turns per day (0.666 mm per day). No need to do 1mm per day for Tibias lengthening since it consolidates slower than Femurs anyway.
I still don't use the dorsi flexion casket they gave us, except for maybe once per week for a few minutes only. I will stop at only 5cm, and my flexion before that was top. Just walking during the day or standing is enough exercise until I finish it.
I do feel tightness, and it feels like a stretch just standing, I do admit that. But it doesn't get worse than that so far, so it's fine.
I still have that bottle they gave us with like 20% of the liquid in it left. I use it frugally, and I don't change my bandages daily as they sometimes instruct us to do. If the bottle runs out I would look online for something similar. The thing they gave us clearly smells like chloride. That stuff does a good job, so I would buy something similar that can also be sprayed.
Also I only take care of the pin sites, all other spots/scars are closed and don't need to be cleaned extra. All these scars seems to heal better when I don't do anything with them, no lotion, nothing.
About being alone in Turkey. I do prefer it like that since I'm very introverted. I can spend a lot of time alone relative to most other people. I have always avoided meeting other patients directly because of that. I wouldn't want to talk about personal stuff and most other topics don't excite me either.
LON TIB + Mech Axis Corr (TIB+FEM) with Fatih Arslanoglu (+2 Surgeons) Turkey
The date for the x-ray was postponed. I'll have a follow up date this week or in two weeks.
I'm at 4 cm. Out of those 4 cm I have lost 5 mm due to the nails giving in or bending a bit. Effectively only 3.5 cm were gained.
In addition to that, I have lost another 1.5 cm since getting up 4h ago. I always lose 1.5 cm after 4h during the day due to spine compression.
I will lengthen another 1.5 cm starting from this point.
x-ray
https://imgur.com/YbASbOL
I had to increase the contrast on the right leg scan to see the callus formation properly. It is way less than on the left leg, but at least there is some.
The measured gap is approx 3.6 cm long, which confirms that I lost almost 5 mm relative to what I lengthened.
Final surgery is scheduled during the end of this month, it includes:
- Frame removal on Tibias
- Axis correction on Femurs and insertion of new nails. This will most likely restrict my ROM.
- Suture of a few scars and ripped fascia
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Summary of my body specs before and after each LL surgery.
Before LON Femur -> after LON Femur (during 2020)
height: 156 cm -> 164 cm
wingspan: 164 cm
sitting height: 86 cm
weight: 64 kg -> 64 kg
Before LON Tibias -> after LON Tibias (during 2022)
height: 164 cm -> 169 cm
wingspan: 164
sitting height: 86 cm
weight: 64 kg -> 64 kg (Yes my weight has not changed yet. It will after gaining back all lost muscle mass)
I almost finished my hospital stay.
My willpower is decreasing each time I wake up from the surgeries during the hospital stay. There is really something going on everytime in the hospitals that add to the negative experience of the hospital stay:
First hospital stay after getting femur frames:
My knees hurt like crazy and I caught a cold.
Second surgery for frame removal: For some reason it hurt more waking up than the first surgery. And being allowed to drink hours after waking up sucks, and I did get my first painkiller kinda late.
And while I was a wreck I had to get xrayed the same night and be moved. It teally hurt
Third surgery for tib frames:
I wrote that experience somewhere above.
Fourth surgery for frame removal:
Woke up really well, had to wait 2h for water but got the painkiller early.
Air conditioner didn't work again so they sent some who fixed it. Noise pollution as always. This time I got red spots everywhere as if blood vessels pop. And my stress increased so much that my tongue started to get so called geographic map on the side.
Now that I went from bow legs to normal legs walking is weird for me. Will write more later and add xrays....
Back to hotel, just finished the first pt session.
This is the before after, from bow legs to normal legs (+ tib lengthening)
https://imgur.com/ubbfTPy
And these are the red spots I got in the hospital I mentioned earlier.
https://imgur.com/aYTr8Ql
Overall, I got a bit more ballerina foot after the surgery. I don't have any bone-related pain, even though additionally to removing the fixator they inserted new nails into the femur canal after breakig the bone ofc.
They fixed my scars (top femur main pins) and my ripped fascia that I got from the other doctor on my first LON Femurs surgery for free.
I do feel most pain coming from the suture. Right now my main objective is getting a healthy looking skin and a fit body that I can look at, and ofc a normal walk.
The visual side-effects I got from all the stress really put a huge dent into my self-esteem. And that is part of what makes LL difficult for me, seeing myself deteriorate a little bit after each surgery. Experiencing this for the fourth time now is really tough and disheartening.
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Something new happened.
Maybe some have noticed me bing not really ecited about the outcome. Why is that.
I knew something was off, but today I found out what it was.
First of all, my mechanical axis was fixed, and if I bend me knee, Femur and Tib are aligned to each other as they should.
Now it turned out I have had all my life so called Femoreal Anteversion
If you lie on your belly, bend your knees 90° and turn both tibs outward toards the bed surface, a normal angle would be 15° for each side measured from the vertical mid line.
Extreme Femoral Anteversion is about 45°
But mine is about 70° .....
Now this is a lengthening forum. Should I start a new diary for this deformity?
I'll continue here.
https://i.imgur.com/Z4cBng2.png
This image shows three walking patterns:
bow legged, normal, and what it feels like in my mind to walk normally.
It took me the whole day to realise how to walk. I have to focus solely on my feet and make them move in stright lines as drawn in the middle of the image.
Even if I can do this now, there is still a problem. It requires almost maximum femoral outside rotation AND a maximum inside kick with the foot that is moving forward.
I was kinda mad that something this obvious was not fixed with a simple rotation by the surgery team, since they said the noticed my femoral anteversion (inside rotation of the femurs). But on the other hand they only mentioned that they noticed this femoral anteversion after I explained to them how I found out the reason for my walking problem.
I dislike how my entire walking problem is being reduced to recovery and contracture of ligaments, and so on...
If they knew about it, they should told me, not the other way around, why walking and even standing and rotating my feet outside is so difficult. Cause I have no spare room of femoral twist left to give.
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A person without femoral anteversion would not have nearly as much of a difficult time to walk normal after getting his legs corrected, becuáuse they have anatomical spare room to rotate their femur to adapt to walking normally.
I have no spare room. I'm basically maxed out on twisting my femur outside and kicking my foot inside that goes forward for the step.
It's not only a difficulty in the mind, but also a permanent offset that I have to adjust with conscious effort because of the way m femurs are rotated inside.
I'm sure this will be covered by my local medical insureance cause the angle deformity in the hips must be insane to have that kind of inward spin. But the issue is how it could have been fixed...
According to them they didn't want to interfere with my biomechanics. But the new difficulty added to walking normally was not worth the mechanical axis fix. My femurs want to naturally rotate inward by about 30°. For some reason being bow legged posed no issue to that. But now it's a problem having a normal mechanical axis.
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