Back to St. John's

Dad is back in the hospital. His leg has an infection and the doctor admitted him this afternoon. The infection has cause a hole under the skin. Mom noticed two days ago while she was changing the dressing on his leg that you could see the actual hardware, or rod, coming out. So that was not a good sign. And then the leg started to have a bad odor to it. We took him to his normal doctors appointment with the plastic surgeon today and he looked at it and said it is infected. He advised us to admit him into the hospital today. We sat for 5 hours with no doctors orders and finally they came in with what they were going to do. So far, he is not on antibiotics because they are taking blood work to figure out what type of infection it is. The plastic surgeon said that once we get rid of infection there are two options. Option 1: to complete a more intense surgery that takes about 8 hours and will create a new skin flap over the wound. They would have to take muscle from dad's stomach and then in a few months ortho can go in and start to rebuild bone. But plastics will only do that if ortho truly thinks they can rebuild the bone successfully. He didn't sound confident because the surgery comes with a long recovery time and possible complications. Option 2: get rid of infection and amputate. Dad was finally open to realizing this process is taking a long time and it might be safer and better to amputate. He said if they can save his knee and then amputate, he would rather do that. Dad said if they have to amputate above the knee, he wants to keep trying surgeries. He says this because when it all first happened, they said the best amputation would be below the knee. Dad is in good spirits and is amazing as he gets told negative thing after negative thing. I am very proud of him and how positive he is staying.  We are starting to think that amputation would be the best and safest thing for dad to do so he will have less recovery and less chance of complications. Thank you for your support and as always, prayers are welcomed and appreciated! I will post tomorrow once we know what type of infection he has.