[the 'stache]

Raymond, firstly, thank you for the well wishes I'm about 13 months out from the injury, and still improving.

I saw the video of Paul George's accident before posting in this thread. As soon as I saw what happened, I knew what he'd done. And as I said, I can relate. Here's what I did.

Last June, I had my injury coming down the stairs from my bedroom. Our black lab was sleeping on the landing at the bottom of our stairs. Well, as I tried to step over him, my left foot slipped, and went off the edge of the landing. I came crashing down, too. I ended up cracking the fibula right where it connects to the tibia below the knee. The major part of the injury happened above the knee. I had what's called a distal femur fracture, meaning the break is of the femur, the largest bone in the human body, right where it connects to the knee. I'd snapped the femur straight in half, and the force was so great that the bone actually shattered into five different pieces. The surgeon that had done a complete ACL reconstruction the winter before had to go in and rebuild my leg.

I'm 5'9" and 173 pounds. My leg swelled up to more than twice its normal size. Can you believe that I actually slept with my leg like that? They shot me up with morphine overnight, put me in a type of immobilizing brace, and I had surgery that afternoon. He needed a foot long titanium plate and 12 screws to put my leg back together. As you can tell, I can't go through the metal detector at the airport without telling them about my surgery, lol. I had about 3 months of therapy. Once that was done, I started getting shooting pains in the area of my leg where the injury had occurred. Those were nerves, and they hurt like hell. They put me on Lyrica, and after a few months, that pain went away. I'm able to walk a good distance, though bending the leg to come down the stairs is still slow going. I've lost a good amount of flexibility, even with all the therapy I did. But anyhow, if you or somebody else says something that I somehow don't catch, like something that is meant to be humorous, please forgive me. The pain medications I'm on for my back and my leg make me a little loopy, and sometimes I miss things I would normally get.