Friday Colton is having surgery on his ankle.
The official diagnosis is Osteochondral defect of the talus.
Basically this means a piece of bone and cartilage has broken free from the end of the talus bone - the ankle. If the detached piece of bone stays put, lying close to where it was detached from, there may be few or no symptoms and the fracture will occasionally heal on it's own.
In Colton's case the fragment of bone has moved and is continually getting smashed around in his ankle joint. This has caused cysts to form in the bone area above and below where the chunk of detached bone is smashing around.
The doctor is going to go in and take out the floating bone fragment, dig out the cysts that have killed bone/cartilage. Then drill holes in the cleaned up bone area to get it to bleed profusely in order to encourage new cartilage growth. At this time that is the plan any how. When the doc gets in there he'll know how deep the cysts go and if a graft of cartilage from his knee is needed or even one from a cadaver - depending on how big of an area is damaged.
Then he can have absolutely NO WEIGHT bearing for a minimum of six weeks. If he bears his weight he could smash and ruin the new cartilage growth and the operation would have been for naught.
So, since this is his right ankle that means no driving himself anywhere. A huge impediment in a 19 year old's life. Merry Christmas, eh?
Anyhow.. that is our talus tale.
Happy Hump day ~ Toodles :)
2 comments:
Good luck to Colton. Wow, six weeks? Going to be real interesting for a 19 yr old. Hope it all goes well.
Oh gosh, not fun. I sure hope everything goes according to plan and that he mends on schedule.
Ugh. Not good.
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