So it has been a while since I wrote a post about anything. I have had a lot of things going on in my life recently and really have not been coping the best. But I thought it was time to do a post and let people know that follow me what is going on.
Things for me really started going majorly downhill since mothers’ day this year. A lot of you know about this situation already but this is still a big part of things that are going on with me at the moment. At the time I was at my sisters in Western Sydney spending time with my sister, my brother-in-law. my nieces and my mother to celebrate Mothers Day for the first time as a family since I was a child.
However, the next day things would take a distract turn for the worse. I had an 8.30am appt. over the phone with my regular GP. I had sent pictures to the clinic for her to view (this is how things have been done ever since COVID hit) of my right foot as within 48 hours part of my foot went from healthy pink to black and very painful.
I was told to return home that day and to go straight to the Central Coast Hospital (which is my local). However, after the long trip home I passed out and didn’t wake til the next morning, so went to the hospital with my caseworker. After several hours there he had to leave and I kept him updated through SMS and phone calls as to what was happening. So the date I ended up at the hospital was the 12th May 2021 and after the Emergency Doctors looked at my foot that immediately contacted the on-call Vascular Surgeon and his team, which happened to be Doctor Bourke. This was a great thing for me as he had been my Vascular Surgeon on every occasion I had been admitted to hospital, which was many times.
So, it didn’t take long for the Vascular Team to arrive in the Emergency Department, it took them less than 10 minutes (which is a miracle time frame, to be honest – but I am not sure what the ED Doctor told them, but it was serious enough for them to come straight to see me).
They looked at my foot, took some photos, sent them to Doctor Bourke (as he had left the hospital personally by this time and only has his Registrar Team on-call for the ED). They came back to me pretty quickly and hit me with the worst possible news. It was not what I was expecting. I was thinking I would be admitted, have a PICC line put in and have strong antibiotics and then be sent home as an outpatient with constant follow-ups. However, I was totally wrong on this.
What I was told next hit me like a tonne of bricks. It made my world come crashing down. A 44-year-old man bursting into tears and telling his vascular team he needed some time to go out, have a cigarette and contact his caseworker and mother. Which they were really great in understanding me having to do that. They already knew about my mental health and serve anxiety and how I could not handle being in hospitals, let alone having surgery.
So, I went outside and first rang my mum and broke the news to her, which was hard for me as at this stage I was in a public area, still in tears and all croaked up in my voice. I then rang my caseworker and filled him in on what was happening. We were all in a bit of disbelief.
The news I had to share was that I was being admitted to the hospital and having emergency surgery later that day to have an amputation of part of my right foot. It was only supposed to be my little toe and surgery was only supposed to take about 30-45 minutes. However, it lasted for just over 3 hours as there were some serious complications during the surgery which required a blood transfusion and deeper amputation than expected as inside the wound a gangrene infection had already spread.
It is now nearly3 1/2 months since the amputation and the wound area has still not fully healed. But to make things even worse there is a serious infection there which is making the wound spread open again and it’s full of liquid and puss and blood. We are doing the best we can to treat it but there is a high chance I may end up back in the hospital soon for a further amputation to occur.
There are also other health issues going on at the moment, but nothing that I really want to get into at the moment, I will probably discuss this in some later posts. But for now, I am going to end this post and do an update on other things hopefully later today as it is now 2.16am on Saturday morning and my medication was late and it is slowly starting to kick in and I think I might be in bed very soon.
So, stay tuned for updates on further personal issues coming later today or even tomorrow.
