Note that Paley advises the lengthening should not exceed be 1mm per day, to minimize risk of nerve injury.
Nerve injury can occur with any lengthening surgery but is usually uncommon if the rate of distraction does not exceed 1mm per day and if the amount of lengthening is restricted. Rate control is the most important factor to prevent nerve damage.
Unicorn is a sharp lady, but unfortunately she either wasn't aware of this, or believed Guichet over Paley, or didn't have the strength to stand up to Guichet and not lengthen more than 1mm/day.
Just to set the record straight, Guichet lengthen his patients about 5mm to 1cm during the initial osteotomy surgery. Then for the first 2 weeks, his schedule is about 1.5mm per day and one reaches about 3cm by Week 2. If we didn't follow his schedule, we get screamed at and verbally abused. Also, we didn't know better about the distracting process. We were told that lengthening lasts 2 months and 1 month of recovery, and then boom! You're discharged fully recovered to go back to work and your friends/family without anyone the wiser. Well, this is all BS! That's how ignorant and naive we were. Most of us never recovered within those times and even the successsful ones took 1.5-2 years to recover normal walking gait and get rid of their lordosis/duckass.
That's why during my 3rd surgery to lengthen my left leg, I decided to just wait 1 entire week before starting to lengthen and avoided Guichet's screaming phonecalls and abusive voicemails. When I finally saw him, he was infuriated that I had not started clicking yet 1 week post surgery. So he MADE ME sit in his office to click 1cm that day. I was not allowed to leave until I finished about 150 clicks. It took about 4 hours and I was crying nonstop because he said I deserve the suffering for not obeying his schedules. My reasoning was that we already established that I'm a slow fuser and my right leg is already non-union, so WHY RUSH on the left leg? It just makes zero sense. But he wouldn't listen to reasoning anymore and was angry that I had no money to pay him for the new nail he installed in my left leg because he had broken my nail in the operating room himself. And he wanted £37k.
This is why I'm hiding today. I'm so scarred by that experience. And as I told you guys here, I opened my bandages to show him oozing green and yellow wounds and asked him if it were normal and could he please prescribe antibiotics. He dismissed it saying his nails are green in colour and if the oozing persists, he'll give me antibiotics in a week's time.
I went straight from his office to Chelsea & Westminster emergency room and they were so shocked to find me in such abandoned condition, they quickly cleaned up my oozing wound sites and then hospitalized me right away with a strong antibiotic drip. By then, my skin had broken underneath (erythema) because the 1cm was too much for the soft tissues to stretch in one day.
So PLEASE do not judge until you've been through this process yourself. It's so easy to sit on the sidelines and hurl opinions when as a patient, you are so confused/in pain/trauma to discern if your doctor is actually making the wrong calls. Remember that we paid a high price for one of the best hospitals in London and their selection of orthopedists to ensure the best outcome. So we did believe everything Guichet said and all of us only realized in hindsight how much we were being deluded.
Hence, my diary. I want each and every potential LLer to be smarter than I was when I leaped into the surgery with only a hope and a prayer.
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Topic: Athletic abilities: 100% back is not possible (Read 5999 times)