Saga of the Foot - The Aftermath

You're back! And it's time to see justice done! My literal flesh had been sacrificed to the negligence of a group of arrogant orthopedic surgeons, as well as a significant amount of my mental health. Through it all, my mind was locked on the idea that I was going to sue those doctors into non-existence. They crippled me even further with their inaction. My foot had to be worth millions! MILLIONS! 

As I started the healing process after surgery, I began the quest online for a lawyer who would take my case. They get a nice percentage of the settlement, so surely a case worth millions would be worth their time. As I found them, I would call them.

Well, my friends, I gave up after talking to at least a dozen different law offices. No one - and I mean NO ONE - was going to touch my case with a 10 foot pole. 

I'll start with the lesser of the two reasons. You see, I was already disabled when I lost my foot. Being on Social Security Disability meant that there was no loss of earned income. That meant that that side of any lawsuit would be worth exactly zero dollars.

The other reason...? I'm a diabetic. Any attorney working to defend against my lawsuit would argue that diabetics suffer amputations all the time and that there was no way of truly knowing the cause of my loss beyond my illness. One lawyer said, "I'm not saying that what you suffered wasn't catastrophic. I'm saying that it would be impossible to win against what is considered common knowledge." My diabetic neuropathy had advanced to the point of Charcot foot. Who's to say an amputation wasn't waiting just around the corner in a month or two?

Talk about a gut-punch. The steady stream of rejections was translated horribly by my severe recurrent depression. "I am literally worthless." Hells, I wasn't even worth the sum of my base elements! THAT, dear reader, is one hell of an insult.

Enter chronic insomnia. I would lie in bed, stewing over the fact that a pair of doctors were going to get away with causing a literal loss of limb for me. I would vacillate between nearly uncontrollable rage and a bottomless pit of despair. Sleep would only come when my eyes swelled shut from exhaustion. The doctor I was seeing at the time went with the old insomnia standby, Ambien. But I turned out to be one of those people whose brain was put into overdrive when taking it. Want to be amused? One of the side effects of the sleep medication known as Ambient is insomnia*. 

My current physician - bless him - recognized my need for something that would shut my brain OFF! Now I'm eventually going to discuss the uses of narcotics when addressing chronic pain, but I'm going to use this doctor and this prescription to exemplify communicating honestly with your doctor!

The prescription is Xanax. (It's generic name is too long to type.) It comes in 0.25, 0.5, 1.0, and 2.0 mg. doses. The pills are also scored, meaning that they have a line in the center that allows you to split them. Pills that don't have scoring should not be split! (Consult your physician or pharmacist if you have any questions about prescribed medications.) My PCP initially prescribed 60 tablets of the 1.0 mg. dose to be used twice a day as needed. This prescription would last me well over two months because... Well, I didn't really need that much.

During a visit with the doc, I told him that I was using half a tablet at night - only 0.5 mg. - and occasionally trying to split the halves into quarters for a 0.25 dose during the day. It's that second part that was a little wonky. Even with a pill-splitter, those quarter-tablets would be randomly sized. Maybe I was only getting 0.15 mg. in a daytime dose. Maybe it was 0.35 mg. I had no idea. Because this is a habit-forming narcotic, I didn't like that I was taking an unknown dose, regardless of how small.

As a result of our discussion, the prescription was reduced to 0.5 mg. tablets that I could easily split by hand down to 0.25 mg. should I need something during daylight hours. That quantity of 60 tablets tends to last 45 days or more.

If you are dishonest with your doctor or withhold information that's vital to your care, you could wind up with the wrong medications, improper doses, ineffective or damaging treatments, or worse. "Worse," in this case, equates to "death,"

Now before I go, I don't know if you noticed the * at the end of my Ambien tale. That's because it brought to mind something I ultimately found very funny. They've since removed it, but according to the insert for Humalog, one of the signs of severe hypoglycemia is DEATH. Death... was just a sign... of low blood sugar. This knowledge led me to suggest that if anyone ever ran across a corpse that they should try giving it a candy bar. There's that slim chance that that's all they needed to live again. 🤣

That's all there is, folks. No one paid the price for medical malpractice. My would-be lawsuit was rejected for the simple fact that I'm a diabetic. Which means, as per my usual luck, the light at the end of the tunnel for me was...

At least it's not an oncoming train, right?