Everything seems to be fine and going well for Joe, he's a tough little boy and very brave. He had a good day yesterday, that improved all day long with each sleep and meal it seemed. Today he seems to have plateaud a bit. He had a good nights sleep and woke up and was a bit teary - it's beginning to dawn on him how he's now going to be incapacitated and what that means in terms of boredom and frustration. He was due to go on an adventure week with all his school mates mid May, he goes to Karate, he plays for his school football team, we were all in training for the new cricket season, the list goes on.
He looked a lot better physically today right from the outset, but he goes back to theatre tomorrow to have the tear across the leg sewn up better as the swelling didn't allow for that to be closed up that well on the first day. I think today he's been worrying about that and despite the way he looks physically he's been very subdued obviously with a lot of thoughts on his mind. I think he's really concerned that there's an expectation that he'll be up and about some time on Tuesday, which seems to be the plan. I get the impression he feels that up till later today he was really concerned that any movement in his good leg will require the engaging of his hips and therefore some movement through his smashed leg. But we had a stroke of luck, because we were just starting to massage his good leg with the theory of getting the blood circulating to cure some pins and needles sensations, when a physio came through the ward to look at another lad. Michelle stopped him and he had a quick chat saying that it wasn't his place really to advise as he had no info, but he then said - looking at the good leg "Yeah do what you're doing and encourage him to flex his toes and ankle and help him get that knee mobile and bend his leg", he noticed the bruising on his swollen ankle and said to the nurse to give us some ice packs and help to reduce the swelling and bruising. Within another 20 minutes or so, Joe had his leg bent at 45 degrees at the knee and had got past the fear of even moving his leg, so that was good. So for the rest of the afternoon we had him (With assistance) having his leg flat and then bent for an hour or so.
We've had to move him around in the bed a bit and slowly it seems as though he's aware that upper body movement and small hip region movement doesn't mean automatic agony in his lower leg. He can still wiggle all of his toes in the bad leg and can feel the toes when touched, but he says doing that causes pain.
The knee ligament thing I mentioned, I'm not so clear about at the minute and Michelle seemed to think that was a longer term objective and the nurses on the ward said that if he's got metal in his legs he's not going to be having any MRI scans till that's removed.
Overall, it all still looks positive in the longer term at the minute. How long it would take for any bone or blood poisoning to show up I haven't got a clue, but I'm sure that's something they'd check. With regards the bone damage, the surgeon seemed more than happy with what he'd done, saying that it was very minimal and that what was removed would soon grow back and that in the greater scheme of things was almost insignificant - it was a scraping rather than a bigger action as such.
Tomorrow will be another rough day I'd imagine, but hopefully after tomorrow things will start to get better. At the moment he hasn't got much of an appetite but that may be down to the mixture of morphine, paracetamol, nurofen and amoxicillin and the fear of having to pooh in the state that he's in, but we got over that as well today and it was no-where near as traumatic as any of us imagined, so perhaps once he's got past tomorrow he'll turn a positive corner?
