7am. I woke up to go to the hospital nice and early, not really knowing what was in the future for me. There was no one else around and I was getting worried that I would have to drive myself down the mountain with one leg. Luckily, the manager managed to get hold of one of the drivers and he kindly drove me down to Bourg Saint Maur Saint Maur and I hobbled my way into the emergency reception where he asked a nurse if he should wait around for me, she said probably not...

Being a French hospital in the mountains, speaking English is not a strict requirement, and as an English speaker with very limited French, communicating with some of the nurses proved to be a little bit of an issue. The first nurse triaged me and sent me to a small room where I was left alone until a male nurse came in who spoke zero English and had to use Google translate to get through to me. At first he said I would have an X-ray, but I told him I'd already had one the day before and had got the images for them to see. So we went straight to the CT scan, where I was maneuvered into the machine. I had to hold as still as I could in an uncomfortable position with my leg screaming in pain while the spinny thing shot radiation through my legs and out the other side. I was then shipped back off to the small room and left alone again until they came back with a bed and carted me off to my new accommodation telling me that I needed to have surgery.

My room was shared with one other person, a young French man who had broken his collar bone. The room was nice, reasonably modern, white, two small TVs and a bathroom. It also had fully automatic shutters that blocked all the light at night and some noise (quite because of the fact that the helicopter was constantly landing overhead). Here I was given a bowl of warm water and a cloth to clean myself before the operation. I also rang my mum and she mentioned that I needed to contact the insurance company before the operation. So I rang them up, opened a claim and gave them the information about alianz to contact the hospital to authorise the surgery or something (basically save me paying who knows how many grand on this operation). Once everything was sorted out, I was given a time for the op and I just had to wait my turn in the queue.

Before I knew it, my time had come. At this point, I still had no idea what they were even going to do. I had never had surgery before and I didn't spend my spare time studying ORIF of the knee. I was taken into the prep room where they shaved my leg :( and tipped me onto my side to have a needle stabbed into my back to paralyse my legs. Once I had sufficiently lost feeling and control of everything from the waist down, they took me into the operating theatre, where my leg was moved to a 45-degree angle and locked into a vice and a curtain was draped across my stomach so that I couldn't see my legs. Earlier, they had offered some sedatives to make me sleepy and relax. However, at some point, they decided that wasn't necessary, so the spinal block was the only thing I got. They also gave me an old mp3 player with some headphones.

Before I knew it, they had begun. I heard a suctioning noise through the music and in the corner of my eye I saw some movement. Turns out it was a clear bucket filling up with my blood that was being sucked out of my swollen knee. I didn't feel the cut although I could feel some of the sucking and things touching my other leg, but there was no pain. Once they had finished sucking, they started moving the broken bones back into position. I could feel the crunches all the way up my leg and into my spine, and then they started drilling. When I first heard the drill start up, I looked at the vitals monitor and saw my heart rate shoot up. It was at this point I decided it would be a good time to ask what they were actually doing. The attendant or someone came over and said they were putting in a plate and screws, with my limited medical knowledge, the only thought that came to mind was a dinner plate and I wondered how they would attach a dinner plate to my leg. My thoughts were interrupted though by the vibrations of the drill going up though my spine as he drilled through my tibia again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again and again. I thought it was going to go on forever and the only thing to distract me was the limited selection of French music on the mp3 player. When they stopped drilling, I thought the worst was over. That was until they started stapling it shut. There were over 30 staples and each one I could feel and hurt more than the last one, I just wanted it to be over. With the incision closed and the pneumatic tourniquet released, it was finally finished and off I went back to the recovery room where I was moved back into my comfy bed that had been pre-heated with hot air and the moment my head touched the pillow I fell asleep.

Once they were happy I was stable, I was taken to the xray room to have a post-op picture taken of the knee, and then back to my room where I was pretty comfortable. My legs were still numb at this point, so I had no pain and was just tired now that all the adrenaline had run out. I fell back asleep until it was time for dinner, where they bought me a selection of mildly unattractive hospital food, but since I had to starve all day, I scoffed it all down without a second thought. The spinal block was still working at this time, so I was pretty happy still, but I needed the toilet which I had to do lying down into a funnny duck shaped plastic bottle with a numb dinky which was quite a bizzare feeling. After dinner, I settled back on the pillow of my electronic bed and drifted off into another restful sleep, until I was rudely awakened, by my leg. The anesthetic had worn off...