A post in which a broken leg would be a GOOD thing.

My husband is a horn-hunter. Yes, he’s a very horny guy. (Is that redundant…. Horny guy??) What is horn hunting? You go out and wander around in the deep woods looking for elk antler sheds. The “season” is generally March-April or so. Then you bring the sheds home and make your wife swear when she stubs her toe on the “decorations” in the middle of the night.

So while the boys were staggering the last mile out (took them several hours) I was talking with the wife of his friend that went with him. She was waiting dinner and getting a little worried they weren’t out yet. I made her promise not to tell Hot Stuff she was cooking an actual meal for her husband….. I don’t want him to get any ideas. We decided we’d give them an hour to check in. I actually KNEW where they had gone and had all the appropriate information to relay to search & rescue should it come to that….

I made a lovely dinner of brown rice & steamed veggies. (Don’t get any ideas… we aren’t healthy.) Hot Stuff finally called and said, “Hon, I hurt myself a little.” The last time he said this was when he stabbed himself in the leg with a machete and was calling from the emergency room…..

The good news is he was with a friend and they were on the way out and only a mile from the rig. The bad news? He hooked the toe of his snowshoe while hiking downhill fast and fell…. And heard a ‘pop’ and had searing knee pain.

Now anyone who is an athlete at any level knows when your lower leg stops and your thigh does a ‘fly by’ you’ve probably blown your acl…. Especially when accompanied by a ‘pop’ sound. ACL surgery takes around 6 months to heal. Visions of no employment this summer, food stamps, losing his insurance and living in a van down by the creek flashed in my mind.

Over the course of the next few days his knee looked like a variety of items from the melon produce section…. Cantaloupe, honeydew, grapefruit….. heck, even a watermelon. We saw the regular doc on Wednesday morning, then to the pharmacy, then to the crutch store, then to the orthopedic doc for x-rays & an exam, then back to the crutch store to get the correct size of crutches, then to get an MRI the next morning.

The regular doc didn’t want to put him through the pain of a full exam knowing the orthopedic guy would do the same thing that afternoon so we didn’t learn much there…. Except it pays to have a good regular doc…. He got us in with a top orthopedic guy in 2 hours… instead of the 3 weeks it usually takes. The orthopedic guy said, based on the exam, he didn’t think there was any ligament damage (can you say yeah???) but something looked odd on the x-ray so off to the MRI we went.

I had an OB appt with the regular doc the next day (because I’m one of those people who doesn’t believe in specialized care I guess). So he checked on the MRI and gave me the results based on the radiologist’s read. Then later we got the official word from the orthopedic doc….. HE BROKE HIS LEG. Yup. A fractured tibial plateau. And the best part??? This is actually GOOD news. No surgery. 4-8 weeks of recovery. He can fight fire this summer. He can remain employed. No unemployment and losing his insurance. No food stamps. Happy Homestead Household.

He’s on crutches for two weeks and doing physical therapy. He sees the doc again on the 31st and we go from there. So that’s what is new around here… how about you??