Elizabeth's leg saga ((updated))

It was a dark and stormy night - or a bright sunny morning, but that doesn't sound nearly as foreboding - when we were taking a routine trip to the grocery store, meaning slowly working our way down a series of three steep, icy slopes. As we were nearing the halfway point on the final drop, Elizabeth stepped onto a particularly deceiving patch of snow; her foot slid the snow aside, betraying the thick sheet of ice beneath it, as she skidded downwards, landing with her left leg at an angle beneath her. We both knew it wasn't going to be good, but we had no idea - yet.

Two days and one scheduled Student Health appointment later, we found ourselves walking a mile and a half in the ice and snow, Elizabeth's ankle swollen to the size of a grapefruit and hardly mobile, searching for the Student Health building - which, as it turns out, is not anywhere near its street address. From there, a snooty receptionist and unimpressed doctor sent us - walking - another half a mile downtown to the radiology center, where we saw the bad news: fractured fibula. On the bright side, the fibula is not a weight-bearing bone.













Sorry about the confusion, we know it's a little hard to find! We've now drawn pink circles around the fracture in both photos - just click on them to zoom in.

From there, Elizabeth was referred to the Central Hospital (in Finnish, conveniently "Keskisuomenkeskussairaala"). We had no idea where that was (still don't, actually), but the radiology receptionist reassured us, in broken English, that we could just ask the bus drivers if they were going there. Comforting. To their credit, however, we did catch the bus there, and were checked in almost immediately, at 7:00 pm. Then began the long process of waiting. And we mean LOOOOOONG.

Thank God we'd had the foresight to buy a couple of novels and Subway before catching the bus there, because we were in the waiting room for a grand total of 10 hours. Ten hours. That meant ten hours without pain medication for Elizabeth - though we did think she was doing a bit better than the young Finnish guy sitting across from us, whose hand had been bitten by a dog and was actively bleeding for no less than 8 hours. We passed time reading, being annoyed at the hospital staff, and dozing in uncomfortable positions, before Elizabeth was called into a room around 5 in the morning.

When we finally emerged from the hospital, Elizabeth's leg had been set in a cast, and we were both exhausted beyond belief. Needless to say, we spent a good part of the day catching up on our sleep, and now, in notably better spirits, Elizabeth is chipping away at the upper portion of her cast (we can't figure out why a cast to stabilize her ankle needs to reach up to her knee), and working on a way to stick her enormous foot into a sneaker. Hehe.