Fun with Wound Care, and more Fun with Wound Care, and More Fun with Wound Care . . .

And so, the next chapter began. We got my mother to the care facility, and found everyone to be very friendly. The biggest jolt in the transition from the hospital was in the food, as the ‘cuisine’ at the facility was not very good. Point of reference: Take your bog standard three-star Michelin restaurant’s food, travel from there up the left of the bell curve and down the other side to the very end, and there you’ll find the food at served at the care facility. My mother and I jokingly referred to the kitchen staff, collectively, as ‘Chef.’ We shivered in trepidation daily, wondering what would emerge from under the green cover. Would it again be the hamburger patty served on bread, without condiments? Or how about the ham sandwich meat served on a hamburger bun? (?) The true thing of wonder was the soup, which morphed as the week went on, until you could recognize elements from soups of days past in your current offering. Well, at least the staff was nice, and the physical therapy staff really helped my mother regain some of her strength and movement.

About three weeks into the stay at the facility, the hematoma decided it wanted to ‘self-evacuate’ after a couple of weeks. This was interesting and fun: Coming back from picking up cold drinks, seeing blood smeared across the floor, and following the trail up to my mother’s blood-soaked foot pillow. Help! I ran to the Nurses Station, and two of them administered to the foot while I grabbed an adult diaper to put under the foot, and then cleaned up the floor. (Although my mother didn’t need adult diapers, using them on her foot was very handy for a number of days. We also entertained the podiatrists with this new fashion in footwear.)

During the stay at the facility, I would take my mother to and from her appointments in my car; generally it would be to see the podiatrists. In the third week of her stay, we had a consult with a plastic surgeon regarding possible future skin grafts. On seeing the hematoma, fully evacuated but with a large, dark eschar, he said he had to get my mother into surgery right away, or remove the eschar in the exam room: He felt the wound was on the verge of infection. The doctor performed the latter, so my mother rolled out of his office with a prescription for Keflex (a broad-spectrum antibiotic), a 10x7 inch open wound on the outside of her right foot, and a program of wound debridement, starting with twice weekly visits to wound care the following week.

So that took us to the beginning of October 2005. We got my mother home, but she was unable to drive, and only able to walk a few steps at a time. Those few steps were enough to get her around the house, which was what mattered for the minimum necessities of living. I did the rest: any shopping that couldn’t be done online, banking, and other assorted errands. I also continued to take her to her various appointments: months of visits to wound care; visits to podiatry, internal medicine.
With her first visit to Wound Care, the specialists took photos of the wound — which had only been freed of its eschar a week previously — because it was one of the largest wounds they had ever seen. The wound was covered in necrotic tissue, a picture of red and yellow and black: It was actually frightening. I was in a state of anxiety looking at it, afraid my mother would lose her foot due to the sheer amount of necrosis. The specialist started working on the wound, removing the necrotic tissue, starting at the top of the wound, and methodically working her way side-to-side, and then downwards. She did this twice weekly for two months, and then weekly from that time onward. She worked a miracle, like a shaman, using various types of bandaging and pads and unguents, that allowed the wound to start to heal, and to slowly start closing.

Unfortunately, as the wound started out being so large, it took months and months of this painstaking treatment before we knew we would see the wound completely healed. Little did we know that wound healing would be interrupted by something much more serious . . .