All in the Family

Here's a photo of Doug, balancing on one foot and still able to put up a mean game of air hockey.

You'll remember my tale of the "curse of the left ankle" which ended badly with the third and final left-ankle injury (a broken bone in Doug's foot.) While wearing his cast, we took a very long road trip to Connecticut. Adventurous as we were, we drove through the night and experimented with driving straight through for 16 hours.

We arrived ready for a fun, fun vacation...but within a few days Doug was having pain and discoloration in his leg. I certainly was no help on giving advice. "Do you want to go to the doctor or not? What do you think they'll do - another x-ray? Do you think there's something they can do to help?"

Luckily, we have a physical therapist in the family! Doug's sister was able to take one look at him and instruct, "You have a blood clot. Go to the hospital now."

He DID have a blood clot, and a pretty miserable vacation lying around with his foot elevated. We ended up staying a few days longer than originally anticipated, so that he could get the medications he needed and make a plan to drive home (staying in a hotel at night this time!) and go directly to a clinic upon arrival to get checked out. His body was very slow to adjust to the oral blood-thinning drugs, so unfortunately he had to inject himself twice a day for a whole week and get his blood drawn and tested daily as well, before he was allowed to stop. Ouch!

Now here we are weeks later, he still gets frequent blood tests, but the bone is on the mend and the oral drugs are at least a stable dose. We're hoping we don't have any more run-ins with clots and we're happy that we DID have a run-in with a really useful and intelligent sister!

When we came home from the trip with a big bag of glucosamine powder (and I remember my favorite jar of alpha-hydroxy acid), I think it's also handy to have a family member with access to chemicals. Hmmm... maybe I really should call up that uncle who has a lot of investment know-how. Family can be so great.