The Saga Continues: Naomi Back in Hospital

Photo straight from mobile phone - no time to process sorry!

The poor girl just can’t get a break!

When we last heard from the heroine of our story, she had suffered a stress fracture in her left knee, as a result of using it too much to compensate for her weak right leg which had had a torn quadricep tendon and loosening prosthetic hip joint. Naomi has now been on crutches for about five months, and the toll on her limbs is starting to show. When a swollen lump appeared on her right knee about a month ago, we just shrugged it off as another odd swelling that so commonly happens with her.

This time, however, the lump didn’t go down, it kept growing, and in the last week it had started to become increasingly painful, tight and red. Naomi was planning to ask her specialist about it today when she saw him for her monthly appointment, but a friend in the medical industry saw the knee yesterday and strongly suggested that we get down to the hospital to check it out.

It turns out that the approximately half-tennis ball sized bump was an abscess of maybe 200-300ml of liquid. Today Naomi underwent a 50 minute minor surgery to drain the abscess, take samples for analysis and have a look around with an arthroscope. The doctors aren’t sure yet if the abscess was infected, as Naomi’s arthritis, and the drugs she takes for it, masks the common markers used to identify infection. The good news however, is that there doesn’t seem to be any infection in the prosthetic knee joint itself. If that had been the case, Naomi would likely have had to have her knee removed completely, and replaced with a temporary cement knee joint embedded with antibiotics, for about six weeks, before having that joint removed and replaced again with another brand new knee joint.

So as of now, Naomi is now recovering from the surgery, and in good spirits. It looks like she will need to stay for at least another week, but there are still a lot of uncertainties about the cause of the problem and how long it will take to recover from the surgery. I’ll keep you informed!

Sorry for the brief diversion from photography talk! I’ll try to have another photo related post tomorrow, but as I’m spending most of the day at the hospital at the moment, I can’t promise anything.