In an attempt to prove it wasn't a fluke, I got back on the exercycle this morning again. I note that my left knee feels less stiff than it's been -- actually, I don't know that stiff is the right word, it's more a case that my lower left leg feels heavier and harder to lift than my right leg. And the soreness around my right knee also seems to be being reduced.

Ok, better living through exercise.

There will be no exercycle on Thursday and Friday this week in any case, because I have meetings downtown those days that require me to catch a train at 7:30 AM, but I will try not to use that as an excuse to fall off the wagon -- or stationary bike, as the case may be.

Last week, I stopped swabbing out the hole in my leg with peroxide and it sort of scabbed over. Last night, I noticed that the long, narrow scabby stuff seemed a bit loose around the edges, so I pulled at it gently.

It came loose to expose unbroken skin. It appears I no longer have a hole in my leg.

I still have a big, ugly divot that will take some time to heal up -- assuming that it will -- but it's no longer an open sore.

I'll take that as a victory condition.

Well, I got hold of someone new at the insurance company -- actually, he called back and got hold of me, having been referred to the problem by the person I spoke to previously who was the fourth person to fail to solve it, but who I actually had a number to call back and complain at. He seems to have an intimate understanding of the problem, so there's some hope that we might get all of these bills straightened out. I'm keeping my fingers crossed.

At work, I'm getting some traction on the project that's been stalled for a very long time, which is good. I've also spent some more time untangling our Windows messaging (which is extremely tangled), but am having some trouble getting some of our folks to understand why this is important to get correct. I'll keep working on it.

Tomorrow morning before the scheduled ice storm, daisy_knotwise, Katie, and I will head out to our favorite Christmas tree lot to collect a tree. That should be substantially more fun... :)

Well, despite having spoken to a representative at United Healthcare who assured me that they'd get all of my deductibles and copays from the first half of the year applied against my claims, it hasn't happened.

Tomorrow, I get to start making phone calls and tear a strip off of someone.

The surgeon looked at the healing hole in my knee today and pronounced it good. Although it's not quite sealed up yet, it continues to heal nicely, so unless something bad happens, we're done seeing each other.

This is a good thing.

I went to see Dr. Bob today to let him take a good look at my knee. He's absolutely delighted with the way that the hole in the leg is healing which delights me as well. And he's pronounced that the nasty patch of skin on my leg is bandage burn and prescribed a corticosteroid cream to clear that up.

It's been ten months, but we may finally get this leg back to normal...

For the first time since my knee surgery in March (save for the one day I had to go to court for a parking ticket that was dismissed), I am wearing pants. I switched over from the bandage wrap that I'd been using to cover the hole in my leg to a large sticky bandage. (I'd say Band-Aid, but it's definitely not a brand-name bandage.)

This is good, because it was getting really cold in the shorts I was wearing...

The hole is much smaller and shallower though, so I'm pretty pleased as are the surgeon and Dr. Bob. There's a nasty rash to the left (as I see it) of the hole, but we're all watching it to see what it does. The docs don't think it's serious, so I'm good with that.

Bob thinks that the hole will close up in about a week. It'll remain an ugly purple divot for quite some time, but closed is good. It means I can stop wearing a garbage bag into the shower. :)

The hole in my leg must be getting smaller, because the fixed-size lump of gauze that I'm using to pack it with keep sticking out further and further. This is good. :)

The skin on the leg, sadly, still looks a lot like a train wreck from all of the abuse that it's been through and just about anything will irritate it. It has three lovely little red marks where Katie managed to puncture the uppermost layer with her sharp little fingernails last night. *sigh*

But it does seem to be getting better. I'll take another round of Lasix tonight and tomorrow to pump some more fluid out of the leg and see if that helps.

In the meantime, the knee itself is doing really well. I'm able to walk up and down stairs normally now, which is a major improvement.

When my company was acquired earlier this year, I switched from the old United Healthcare plan that I was on to the new United Healthcare plan that I'm on now. They're fairly similar in most respects. I was assured that my deductibles and the overall personal medical expense cap that I'd met with my March surgery would carry over to the new insurance.

Shortly before going in for my follow-up surgery in September, I checked the UHC website which showed that none of my earlier expenses had been credited. I called them and complained and they assured me that they would fix it.

Needless to say, that hasn't been done as I discovered when I looked at the recently processed claims on the website.

I've called again. I was not entirely pleasant. Interestingly, the record of my earlier call was in their system. No sign that anyone had actually been moved to do anything about it, but they had entered it for posterity.

Posterity has now sent my problem through to the appropriate department marked as "Urgent!" This may or may not improve the situation.

In the meantime, the new FSA sends me checks for what it thinks I'm supposed to be paying. Of course, those are things that I'm not supposed to be paying, so they shouldn't be disbursing the money.

It's also not clear that we've actually found all of the checks.

I love straightening out these messes. *sigh*

I saw the surgeon this morning and Dr. Bob this afternoon. They like the way that my leg is healing (Yay!) and said to keep doing what I'm doing in terms of keeping it cleaned out and dressed.

Bob said that I'm likely to see the hole close up in a month or so, which would be a fine thing. :)

Well, I still have a big hole in my leg. This is not a surprise. I'll likely have this hole for months. *sigh*

But the infection in my leg appears to have been cleared up by the surgery and antibiotics and that's a very good thing. The hole continues to slowly leak blood, but it's apparently the correct color down there (red) according to a phone conversation with Dr. Bob earlier this week. And my knee is only barely swollen now.

So it seems to be getting better. I see Dr. Bob and the surgeon again on Tuesday and they'll take a look at it and tell me what they think then.

ClearCase continues to be the gift that keeps on giving here at work. There was a file I thought I had checked in before I left on vacation. It didn't check in. As a result, the background check-in code that I wrote didn't work, people commented out chunks of it, dogs and cats were sleeping together, and huge stones fell from the sky.

I've now added the one missing line of code to the non-checked-in file and have restored the commented out code. It appears that ClearCase took the change this time.

Last night, I skipped redressing my leg before going to bed. When I went to look at it this morning, the hole was much deeper than I remembered it being, no doubt due to the huge mass of clot that the surgeon cleaned out yesterday. Although I'm told it's healing, seeing a deeper hole is just frustrating when you'd really like there to be no hole. I'll just keep working on it, I guess.

In happier news, the weather is gorgeous and I'm heading home for dinner with my lovely wife, my amazingly cute daughter, and my brother and sister in law who just bought their condo in Des Plaines so they can spend more time with their new niece.

So I think I can cope with the minor annoyances. :)

(This does mean that we're blowing off tonight's Capricon meeting, for which I must apologize to Leane at some point...)

And so I return to work from vacation to discover that someone has managed to hose our resource file in such a way that I can't check it in from regular ClearCase. Not Remote ClearCase, but Regular ClearCase.

In better news, both Dr. Bob and the surgeon think that my leg is improving and the stitches have been removed. So there's just the one big ugly open sore that needs to heal now...

*sigh*

Update: Ok, the file's checked in now. Maybe I fixed the problem once and for all, maybe I didn't. We'll see. But it looks like at least two other guys in the group thought they'd checked in changes to that file that didn't actually arrive.

Despite a really big accident on I-635 (six cars, all lanes but one blocked by the police), we arrived at our motel at about 1:00 AM. Unfortunately, Katie had slept long enough in the car and spent enough time in the car seat that she spent the next several hours playing free-range baby and refused to go to sleep before 4:00 AM. As a result, we're a bit tired. :)

Later today, we will probably go see my nephew's high school football team (number one in the nation!) play the number two high school football team in the nation at SMU. Apparently, this has never happened before...

Oh, and the knee seems to be holding up ok, although I'll know more when I change the dressing. But daisy_knotwise is giving Katie a bath right now so she's clean and fresh when she meets the rest of the family.

Well, we didn't forget a lot of things on the way out of the house. (So far, a book and paper towels. We'll see what else materializes -- or fails to!)

We got out around 6 PM, much later than planned, but that's the way the day was. We met catalana for a late dinner in CU, then headed on down to Marion, Illinois, arriving a bit after 1 AM.

The leg spent the trip propped up on the center console, which worked pretty well. It's a bit red this morning, but not bad. I'm going to change the dressing shortly and see how it looks.

And I thought my doctor had given me more Cipro, but Walgreen's gave me something else that they're claiming is what he wrote on the prescription pad, so I'm making phone calls.

Well, the hospital may have thought my surgery was being moved up from 4 PM to Noon, but after I got there at 11 AM, they put in the IV and I sat. And sat. And sat. As did daisy_knotwise and Katie in the waiting room, since she wasn't allowed to bring Katie back. About 2 PM I asked if someone could go tell her that I hadn't gone in yet.

At 3 PM or thereabouts (no watch, of course. No glasses either.), they took me off to surgery where they removed a staple, a metal screw and washer, and two plastic screws from my knee and debrided a lot of infected tissue. How much exactly, I don't know yet, as the leg is well wrapped in an elastic bandage. But I see blood oozing out through the bandage, so I'd say there's a lot of open wound down there.

I'll know more in the morning when I go in to the doctor's office to have the dressing changed. Dr. Bob's asked me to have the surgeon call him while I'm there so he can discuss the course of future treatment. We'll see how that goes.

After I got out of the hospital a bit after 6 PM, we went up to Gulliver's for dinner where I dutifully popped the bad leg up on a chair. Now I'm home in the recliner chair.

And soon, I'm going to go get some sleep.

My surgery's been moved up from 4 PM to Noon, so we're heading out shortly.

Wish me luck!

Well, it appears that the fiasco with the Remote ClearCase check-ins on Friday is unfixable, so I had to destroy my view in order to save it. At this point, the ClearCase expert has suggested that I abandon Remote ClearCase and go back to using the regular version of ClearCase so I have access to the command-line tools in case something this stupid ever happens again.

So that's what I'm trying.

In the meantime, the hospital called today to schedule my surgery for Wednesday for which I need a history and physical. Fortunately, Dr. Bob had a hole in his schedule this afternoon, so I managed to get it done with him. Otherwise, I could have just gotten to the hospital earlier. That may have been the objective, given the notice that I was given. The good news was that they got my records from the other hospital where the surgery occurred which allowed us to skip the EKG and several blood tests.

The surgery is at 4 PM, supposedly outpatient, and I'm to have nothing to eat or drink after 7 AM. I predict that my mood by 4 PM will be interesting.

I had wanted to see Dr. Bob today anyway, as I was looking at a soft spot on the leg. He thinks it's not a problem, which is encouraging.

Meanwhile, as I typed this entry, the regular version of ClearCase has decided to choke and die as I try to check in the same file that failed on Friday.

"Choke and kill" is starting to sound like the right thing to do to our VOB server.

The original surgeon who did the work on my knee had a scheduled follow-up exam today where he was rather distressed to see that we were still fighting the staph infection in my leg six weeks later. I'm now scheduled for outpatient surgery a week from tomorrow to remove the anchors that he put in to hold the replacement ligaments, since they're no longer required and appear to be the source of infection.

Dr. Bob was greatly amused by this. (I needed to see him to get my prescriptions moved to the new mail-order pharmacy anyway, so I figured he'd enjoy the report.)

He does, however, think that the leg looks much better. Keeping it that way once I go off the Cipro is the hard part, so the surgery looks to be a good idea.

And the evening of the day following the surgery, daisy_knotwise, Katie, and I set off for Texas to visit family and attend Fencon. (Which is why the surgery is set for next Wednesday.)

Whee!

Well, fourteen days of Augmentin did not kill the staph infection in my leg, so on Wednesday I went back to see Dr. Bob who wrote me a prescription for 21 days of Bactrim. The leg has slowly been becoming less red and is almost looking normal -- save for the slowly closing hole where the original infection erupted.

However, the swelling in my left foot that has been there ever since the surgery has gone away, my knee no longer feels swollen at all, and the leg looks like it's more or less the same size as my other leg. That's a major improvement.

We'll see how it goes. Bob has promised an update on the wound culture tomorrow. They already determined that it's staph and that it wasn't growing too quickly, but it'd be nice to know more about the pedigree of the beasts in my leg.

*sigh*

This morning, I headed out to the surgeon's office for my latest follow up appointment. He looked a bit distressed about the cellulitis which, he said, was not likely the result of the surgery. I also called my sore hip to his attention, as it had been sore since after Marcon. He said that I walked like I had an arthritic hip and sent me across the hall for X-rays. One position involved twisting the left leg into a "frog-leg" position.

Voila! Hip pain goes away. (It's back a bit now after much abuse today, but I'll be trying the frog-leg position again shortly.) And the X-rays show that my hip is fine. :)

I picked up daisy_knotwise and Katie. We grabbed lunch and headed down to Dr. Bob's office for my follow up on the cellulitis, where Bob said it was so a result of the surgery. Apparently I had a seroma as a result of the surgery which became infected, was keeping the leg excited with secondary infections, and which eventually ran wild and ruptured, at least in Bob's opinion.

I rather trust Bob's opinion. :)

After that, we headed up to the River Road Blue Line station and took the El that I don't want to be taking to work down to the Loop to meet with our attorney and go over some paperwork. That appointment was at 4 PM, so by the time we finished and got on the train (with Katie in stroller) it was rush hour.

Oh, joy.

But we got home fine, grabbed some dinner at Red Robin, watched the Cubs beat the Cards (drat!), and entertained Katie while Gretchen got asymptotically close to the end of Deathly Hallows.

Once Katie goes to sleep, she'll be finishing it.

The antibiotics are improving the situation with the cellulitis, as the hole is getting smaller, although it's still oozing. (Yum!) Tomorrow, I have doctor's appointments with both the surgeon and Dr. Bob, at which point at least one of them will inform me of their plans for my future.

Antibiotics are a wonderful thing. The leg is no longer red and warm. The lump is leaking vile, sticky stuff at a tremendous rate.

More warm compresses are scheduled shortly.

I'm starting to suspect that I've had a low-grade version of this in that leg since shortly after the surgery, which would explain a lot of the swelling that never would go down, along with the couple of pimples that I thought were ingrown hairs, but which may well not have been based on what I read on-line about symptoms. Duh.

But it looks like it's getting better.