Week 7

        Our first stop was to get my cast removed. We left the room and went down a long hallway and got on an elevator to the floor above us but it turned out we were in the wrong area so we had to go back to where we had come from. Nick somehow procured a wheelchair and had me sit down while we figured out where we were supposed to go. A nurse came and led us to the room where they were going to remove my cast. I sat on top of a gurney and two nurses started examining the cast. They were speaking German but I could tell they were wondering about the long slit down the cast. They eventually asked me about it and I told them the nurses in Vienna had done that to provide room for swelling. They tried cracking the cast open but they couldn’t so they had to get scissors and they started to cut little pieces away. The only part of my leg I had been able to see since the accident was through that thin slit and my leg looked green and blue but I was not at all prepared for what it actually looked like when the cast came off. It was pretty disgusting. My leg looked like it was in the first stage of decomposition. From the knee down, my entire leg was covered in bruises and from the ankle to my toes everything was swollen. My leg was purple, yellow, green, and blue! It got even grosser because there was this MASSIVE pressure sore on the right side of my lower leg and a smaller pressure sore on the lower left side of my leg. It looked like an alien was growing in the boil on the right side of my leg. The nurses were as surprised as I was to see that and they called the doctor I had just seen to come and look at them. When she arrived she started to feel the boil and then she got a pair of tweezer looking things and popped them. A ton of liquid, clear and tinged with blood, came pouring out of the boil and it stung so much! She repeated the process on the other side and then proceeded to rip away the skin that was left hanging until she had cleared the area. I now had these two open wound on either side of my leg. They covered the wounds with medicated gauze and regular gauze and then wrapped my leg in bandages. The nurses then started to make a new cast for my foot but it only covered the back of my leg and the bottom of my foot so it was like half of a cast with the front of my leg open to the air. They held the cast in place by wrapping a bunch of bandages around my leg and cast so that it was securely placed.