One rainy Tuesday morning, Nancy Meaders was rushing out the door to aerobics class with her purse, clothes and briefcase in tow. While walking to her car, she slipped on her husband’s slick, wooden wheelchair ramp. As she fell, she felt a pop and then noticed her foot was turned outward. She crawled to her purse to call for help. The Peachtree City Fire Department responded and took her to Piedmont Fayette Hospital. “They thought it was just broken, but didn’t realize how badly I had broken it,” Meaders explains.
The hospital staff put her foot in a soft cast and told her to contact her orthopedic surgeon, who operated on her foot a few days later. “I had broken both the tibia and the fibula in my foot and had shattered the fibula,” she says. The surgeon told her it would be six to eight weeks for the incision to heal, but after about four weeks, she noticed it was not improving. Meaders went to Piedmont Fayette’s Wound Care and Hyperbaric Center, where they removed the wound’s scab and found that it had become infected.
Wound care physician Michael Robinowitz, M.D., removed several pieces of bone from the wound and sent her to the infectious disease department. They ran tests and discovered Meaders had two types of infections in her foot, so they gave her intravenous antibiotics. “Without going to the Wound Care Center, I don’t think they would have found the infection,” she says.
Left untreated, infections can spread to other parts of the body, leading to complications like shock, amputation or organ failure. Meaders is now back to enjoying the life she had before the injury. “I’m still not 100% – my foot still has a tiny bit of swelling, but after what I’ve been through, I’m amazed that it is doing as well as it is,” she says. “I’m back to line dancing and doing most anything I want to do.”
Meaders is grateful to Piedmont Fayette for healing her foot. "It's a world of difference. It certainly makes me appreciate having two feet."
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