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HeadphoneAddict seriously injured in car accident


Blutarsky

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Larry, it's always refreshing to hear you talk medicine.  "I have no other symptoms of too much opioids" ^_^

Sounds like things are not as good as they could be, but far better than where they were a few months ago.  McKenna seems to be doing very well, or at least she's not letting injury and pain stand between her and what she wants to do.  That's really encouraging news.

Keep at it, man.  You're still here, and the line is trending up.

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Best wishes for this next surgery, Larry... for an improved and hopefully as good as new left femur.  Your daughter seems wise to delay her ankle fusion surgery, and is obviously bright and ambitious to be managing all of this while still performing well at Duke.  Not an easy way to go to college, but it is what it is and she's soldiered on.  Can't imagine anything ever stopping that girl from pursuing her dreams if this hasn't!  You must be enormously proud of her, and it's good to know that there is some insurance money to pay for her college costs and set her up reasonably for law school.  The ongoing medical costs are so hard to predict, so quite wise of you to be planning as best you can for that as well.  In the meantime, all the best with the day by day.

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Thanks everyone.  This has been a really tough time for us.  Sometimes just having to make the hard decisions, or having choices forced upon us, is as painful as the physical sequelae we're experiencing.  So much is going on that it's hard to go with the flow - I have think 5 steps ahead like playing chess.

I would have preferred to just try the simple outpatient procedure of removing the lower screw in my femur rod/nail, so that my upper femur could settle down further onto the lower femur at the site of the fracture, and we'd know in 4-6 weeks if it was successful.  That was the second option presented to me by my doctor (rod replacement was 1st), but it was less invasive and less dangerous with me having only one working lung - it could keep me from needing the more invasive and expensive procedure.

But my health insurance company would likely make me wait 8-12 weeks after the simple procedure before allowing them to replace the rod if this failed, pushing the $50K surgery out to 2016 with a new $3K deductible and another $5K max out of pocket.  We've already had to meet our deductible for 2014 and 2015 for this accident, and don't want to pay it a 3rd year in a row for the same injury/accident.  

As I waffled over this decision my surgeon invited me to go to Vegas with him because it would still be gambling but more fun.

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I think you're making the right choice, doing the more invasive procedure this year.  As long as our country has profit based health care, these are the kinds of decisions that have to be made.

At least this time I wont be going under anesthesia right after a huge trauma.

I found a couple of sharper photos of our car after the accident.  The right side has no doors because they had to use the "jaws of life" to get me out.  The front end was entirely caved in and flat, and the dashboard came into the passenger compartment by several inches so we didn't have room for our legs to stay intact.  Combined impact speed was about 100mph between the two vehicles.

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More nasty photos I couldn't post until the case was settled - my right knee and left ankle postop.

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