Just call me "Cripple."

Last April I sprained my ankle. Badly. Really badly. Greta likes to tell people that I tried to tear my foot off of my body. (She's a funny one.) The way it happened is slightly amusing, actually. IVCF is helps out campus security every year during A-Day (a agricultural fair run by the students. It's a state fair now. That's right. We're awesome.). We stay out all night--from 9pm to 6am the next morning--and make sure other, less sober, responsible people don't mess with things. It's super fun and I love it. Great bonding happens around 3am. Anyway, we were out there, the second or third night, and I get a phone call around 11 o'clock:

"Hey mom!"
"Hey. Do you get a break?"
"No, why?"
"Because I want to give you these brownies I made you."
"What? Where are you?!"
"At Security."

At this point I hung up on my mom in excitement. Heh. See, every year either my dad or my mom come up and spend a day of A-Day with me, but both of them had said that they couldn't make it last year. Well, Mom got sneaky and decided to surprise me one night. I was very excited. I hopped in the go-kart to meet her at security. After a brief greeting, I told her where to park her car and went to take the cart back to the other IVCFers. Then, I started running to the parking lot to meet her. I rounded a corner, and out of the range of the street lights. Suddenly, down I went. I'd managed to find a pot hole in the walkway as I was running in the dark. I knew immediately that I'd hurt my ankle, but it only felt like I'd rolled it. I figured I could walk it off. As I limped the rest of the way to the parking lot, I began to think that maybe it was worse than just a rolled ankle.

Long story short, it hurt a whole lot, mom went to her hotel room, I stayed out with my "crew." Around 2am I decided it was really bad, and that I should probably go to the hospital. (There's one about .2 seconds from school.) Great said she'd go with me, and we got a ride from Security. We sat around, and then a man took x-rays of it very roughly (it hurt!!) and then we sat around some more. A lot. The doctor finally came in for 2 min and gave me crutches and referred me to a specialist. She told me that I had tears in all three of the ligaments in my ankle. So then I was on crutches for a week and a half, and in a brace for a month. Over the summer I did physical therapy, but my ankle still hurt. After taking more x-rays (one set "under stress." THAT was fun) the doctor determined that I have a space/hole in my ankle joint because the ligaments didn't tighten up enough. He said I could either deal with the pain, or get surgery. I'm opting for the surgery. I have an appointment with the surgeon on the 11th. Which is the main purpose for this entry.

I'm hoping to get the surgery done over winter break so I don't have to wait super long and so that I'll hopefully have enough recovery time before I have to be back in school, climbing two flights of stairs multiple times a day. Hopefully this does the trick.