fuck that looks cool. what is the imaging? looks like any worse and they might have amputated...not an easy break there. how long on crutches.

I will be non-weight bearing until somewhere between first week of March and first week of April. Then I'll begin putting weight on it with the crutches. Then, who knows when, I'll ditch the crutches.

Here is some more.

very cool. but also quite amazingly painful looking. damn, that is the craziest thing, from just turnin round and all. wow.

i was just recallin your last pic, with the cast and wondering if they do things differently in the states than here. i just had a few screws put into my broken foot, but nary a cast in site, apparently to give access to the cut they made for surgery.

my brother was the same last year (he is also ex-pat in japan, but a performance artist rather than architect); his femur was broken into five pieces after being hit by a car, and they declined to put a cast on it as well...i don't know how he could stand it as i am seriously paranoid when anytone comes anywhere near me; i know all it would take is a bit of a push to feel some serious pain....subways at rush hour are def off the agenda for a few months...

how you finding it to get around?

beta, I forgot to answer your one question. The 3d images are MRI images. They gave me a disk with many frames rotating in a couple directions. I had to "Print Screen" to get these. Unfortunately I don't have Photoshop here to keep things clean.

jump, the cast I have now takes all of 5 minutes to make. It is a pretty cool fiberglass tape that hardens within a few minutes. They just wet it and wrap it on. With every doctors visit they would remove it and treat the sutured areas. All stitches are out now, and the pin holes are scabbed over so they will leave this cast on for a month.

The first "casts" I had were just splints and wrap - not hard at all. Now the fiberglass cast is just protection. The plates and screws do all of the work.

I get around pretty comfortably now. Confidence comes with each day. I can climb and descend stairs with ease, as long as there are rails. With no rails, I can handle about two steps.

I developed a technique to get full cup of coffee or water to my chair from the kitchen. I spread my crutches, move the cup from one surface to another, take a step, and repeat until the cup is where I want it. I probably look pretty funny. Without surfaces like tables, counters, and half walls I would have to scoot on my ass with the drinks.

Luckily in LA I can avoid the crowds - no subways. I can drive since this is my left foot - though I don't plan to do it much.

Oh, and it was painful enough to drop an F-bomb with grace in front of my mom.

garpike, those almost look like the 4d images they use for pregnant women. any chance you can take those images and create a model?

beta, if I could somehow get a hold of the file they use I could probably convert it to 3d. The software provided on the disk allows me to "rotate" the views, but you can see that it only loads a series of images. The 3d model isn't really on my disk.

dude, you have to get the file, that would be awesome to make.

And then you could have it CNC'd out of aluminum, anodize it black, and use it to keep your favorite shoe from losing shape.

Or am I taking this too far?

I wonder if it is just a simple mesh file, or maybe that is old school for the medical world. The colors on this model are great. And they can add and take out parts like muscles and what not. I don't have any images of those.

Ha ha no no that is good, Janosh. I could grab my shoes in the morning and be reminded "Oh yeah. Don't break bones today. Almost forgot."

ha ha, that description of moving coffee around is spot on.

i am getting slightly good at swinging my right crutch with my arm-pit and keeping my right hand free, but still have accidents every other day and my wife won't let me carry any drink to the table anymore. coffee it turns out doesn't come out of the carpet as easily as one might hope...

i had the frp splint thing for a few weeks too, but just on the back of my leg and with the stitches (actually staples, which was totally cool) all open to the air. now they have made a custom leather dealy that straps to my foot and keeps me from bending the arch, but the broken bones are totally open to the public and unprotected now. very scary. wish i had a car, but driving in tokyo is such a pain it maybe is better that i don't...

i only got x-rays. now i am feeling very left out of the technology loop. but why stop with your leg? would be even more cool to get a whole body model, then you could populate your animations with images of yoself...

Oh wow, jump! Back when you said you broke your leg dancing I had no idea you meant recently. I thought you were recalling a past incident.

Suddenly I don't feel so alone.

oh god garpike those images give me the willies almost worse than all the spiders and assorted gross creatures over on ether's thread!!! God, ouch.

The images with all the screws in place is very cool. My dad works for a company that manufactures cast metal replacement hips, knees, and shoulders, plus they make these "tendon staples" that are the most evil looking little buggers you've ever seen. I have one, I keep meaning to wire it up into a necklace.

Also, I don't want to scare you but do be careful even as your confidence grows - I went to high school with kid who broke his fibula, then as he got more confident started riding his bike in the cast, then one day fell over on the bike and broke his femur too - he was in the hospital for a long time after that. So please be careful.

So very interesting to see these images, thanks for posting them. Your loss of mobility is definitely archinect's gain!

Yeah, jump, I'm with garpike - I thought you were recalling a long-ago incident too. You guys be careful! Jeepers we're so fragile.

Oh, by confidence I mean in the things I am allowed to do. I am a "good" patient. Having parents who have worked in hospitals provides me with more horror stories that one needs.

Thanks for looking out, lb.

ha, no i broke my foot just after new year's. but i feel a bit embarassed to even mention it cuz it ain't such a big deal compared to your break.

worse bit of the whole thing for me was that friggin catheter, which is i think an illegal instrument of torture under the geneva convention.

LB, absolutely nothing like a stupid-ly broken bone to remind us of our frailness. human bodies are such strange things...

Ouch! Aren't those things supposed to connect?

Those are amazing images, love that they ad the gore back into the scan, (they can't actually tell the colors of your innards from an MRI can they?) As a kid that was something that always kind of flummoxed me, I would have been very interested to see my insides, but knew that something would have to be majorly wrong for me to ever do so.

Wait a minute! I see some shoddy workmanship in the bone gallery, that last image looks like you have a screw that has slipped through the plate! That contractor is gonna catch hell come Monday morning...

lemme take care of that 4 u...

FOG lite, that screw that appears to have slipped through is actually supposed to be outside the plate. It is just doing its job alone. You can see that my tibia is a mess at the joint. The bottom piece broke into two.

FOG, those colors are kind of freaky. I have no idea how they do it. I have an image looking down and you can see marrow. It looks like light blue wet goo, so I guess the colors aren't all accurate. I'll post that image soon.

vado, thought of that...

I added pictures. Note the marrow goo with no color.

Garpike is a robot! The machines have risen! Run for your lives!!!! The revolution is upon us.

I never thought I'd become one of Them. I knew the day would come that we would have to work together. Not today, but someday. And now I am one of Them.

[Sorry. The gf has me reading sci-fi.]

That's brutal. How'd that happen?

cool imaging tho ...

wow man that last set is totally fcuked up. your leg must have looked like a ballon after they did that to ya....

shitty thing is they have to take all that crap out after a year or so.

my brother is still putting off doing his metal-tectomy cuz it supposedly means another 6 months of down time. his case is maybe extreme cuz he had 5 brakes being pinned together stead o just two, but DAMN.

i mean...damn.

hey gar, did the doc's happen to note whether or not the external fixators allow for any weight bearing, or were they just to stabilize the fractured bone fragments in order for new bone growth to repair fractured areas?

driftwood, read my MySpace Blog for the whole sad, boring story.

jump, balloon? Yes. Ha. They told me I only need to remove the metal if it bothers me. I think I will have to suck it up and do it because I can't go on thinking that my bones are perforated, and therefore weakened - prepared for another break. The gross/painful part is my dad says the periosteum could grow over the metal. This is the sheath that contains all of the nerves.

beta, I am non-weight bearing now for 8 to 12 months. I no longer have the ex-fix. The reason I had it was to temporarly (2 weeks) hold the tibia while the swelling from the fibula surgery went down. She couldn't repair both bones in one surgery only because of the swelling. If they cut slits on bith sides of my ankle, my ankle could ostensibly split open. Too much trama.

beta, as far as ex-fix allowing for weight bearing, mine was somewhat flexible. It was carbon fiber. I would say it is good only for holding the bones in place, and not supporting weight.

garpike,

i hope you got a cleat built into the bottom of your cast. That would be a sweet shoe for bike riding.

Ha ha ha ha yeah! My cast is SPD compatible.