Matthew Brewer

Note: This post is the follow-up to Surgery.



We received my pre-op instructions the Friday before surgery day to shower twice before the day of with Hibicleanse, stop eating food and drinking non-clear liquids at midnight the night before, and only sip clear liquids until seven-thirty AM the morning of. We were also given our final arrival time: eight AM, updated from our original six AM timeslot that would have had us wake up as early as three-thirty in the morning. Having to be there by eight versus six meant we could sleep in much later than before, and overall made our trip to Chicago and back much more pleasant. Once we arrived, all the staff at the hospital were wonderful, I had a great time with them and my orthopedic specialist before surgery, and I was wheeled out of the pre-op room around ten forty-five en route to the operating room. I woke up in the post-op room after my surgery around twelve forty in the afternoon, and was happily eating a giant sausage pizza roll from the hospital cafeteria less than an hour later downstairs in the recovery room. Hours later, after plenty of room visits, episodes of Castle, and a brief visit from one of their physical therapists who helped me take my first few hops out of bed and showed us a few ways to get me upstairs, we left the hospital around dinner time, and picked up fast food on the way back.

Once we got home and inside, I had a lovely, extended FaceTime call with my grandmother, and in my recovery, I've been filling my newfound spare time conversing on X, playing Crossy Road on my phone and Crossy Road Castle on my old Xbox, and binging a mix of movies and television shows, from The Rookie: Feds to Destination X and America's Got Talent, A Minecraft Movie, Five Nights at Freddy's, and old The Big Bang Theory reruns. More recently into my recovery, I've also been able to make it over to my desk for short periods to play my collection of PC titles, and I've been busy drafting dozens of new blog posts in my head. My pain has actually been surprisingly tolerable from the moment I woke up in Chicago, and my idle pain when I'm just sitting there has been minimal. The only meaningful pain I've experienced has been while shifting positions or trying to put weight on my leg, which has both become almost non-existent as time has gone on. That isn't to say I don't still have pain, but it's much less common and more so when I'm putting too much strain on my leg, especially in weird positions. While awake, getting into a comfortable sitting position is relatively rudimentary for me, but sleeping has been a completely different story. For the first couple of weeks, I could only lie comfortably in a couple of hyper-specific positions, but even now, there's still a delicate art to getting and staying comfortable in my cast while horizontal. I've primarily been getting around the house by hopping with my walker, though in the past week or so, I have been able to start taking some small steps here and there. Also in the past week, I've been dealing with increasingly powerful and relentless itches inside my cast that have been incredibly difficult to alleviate. One of the recommendations we were given to deal with itching was to use a cold hair dryer to blow air into the cast, but we haven't had much success with that.

I would say the worst part of my forced staycation, aside from the occasional random outbursts of pain, is the significant hampering of what I can do, when I can do it, and where I can go, as well as my inability to be out, interacting in the world. I haven't been outside since surgery day, and inside, my travels haven't gone much farther than the living room. With that in mind, in the weekends leading up to surgery day, we kept busy attending a Dierks Bentley concert with my aunt, spending quality family time in downstate Illinois with my grandmother, and watching the sunsets with our family friends up at their Wisconsin lakehouse. With the exception of the concert, it's a pretty standard summer calendar for us, although I will admit this is the first time we've packed the festivities in so tightly. Regardless, the hospital staff weren't impressed when I said we hadn't been up to much.

The first time I stepped outside the house post-surgery was on the sixteenth to tag along while my parents coordinated bringing one of my father's dump trucks to the repair shop. It wasn't by my choice, but we did go out to dinner at Chili's afterwards for the first time in a long while. Not that I would've stayed home for much longer after that, as the following day, I had to go to a follow-up doctor's appointment with my neurologist. As for physical therapy, I had my first appointment on the twenty-third, where I was given some simple exercises to do with my leg until I can properly begin therapy once my cast gets cut off on August 13.

On April 2, my mother received a phone call from my orthopedic specialist. He was calling with the results of a gait analysis I did back in January, where I was camera recorded and motion captured walking back and forth to create a three-dimensional, stick-like figure of how I walk. I almost wish it were a late April Fool's Day prank, but as I mentioned in To Date as a possibility for the future, I need surgery. Dubbed "heel lengthening" by my orthopedic specialist, the surgery involves making small incisions in the lower back of my leg to make cuts in my Achilles tendon in the hope that it will elongate as it heals so I can begin to walk with my right foot flat to the ground and have a much wider, more normal range of motion in it and my ankle. While under, he informed my mother that I may also need arch flattening surgery, which is when the arch of the foot requires restoration by repairing the supportive bones, ligaments, and tendons in the foot, though he advised her that he would determine that and follow through on it if necessary during my heel lengthening. He also mentioned that I'll be cast for a new orthopedic brace like the ones I used to wear when I was younger while asleep and that the surgery is outpatient, meaning I can go home the same day.

For the first six weeks post-surgery, I will be in a walking cast, and for the first week, will undoubtedly be in a lot of pain and require great assistance getting around and doing things from my parents and a pair of crutches or a walker. After the first seven days, I should mostly be able to get around on my own, albeit weighed down by the extra weight of the walking cast. Past the first six weeks, assuming the well recovery of my Achilles tendon, I'll get my cast cut off and likely go into wearing my new orthopedic brace for the foreseeable future—a wonderful additional complicating factor in shoe shopping and source of embarrassment.

I'd be lying if I said I wasn't worried. Worried about everything that could go wrong, worried about what complications the symptoms of my diagnosis could cause, and worried about the road ahead after recovery. The reason I didn't do the surgery when I was younger was because I was scared of it, and I know I'll be better off once all this is behind me, but that doesn't make the now any easier.

The surgery is scheduled for July 1, and I'm publishing this as soon as possible so that I can get all the details out in one place. I've started a countdown to the big day on my website, and if all goes to plan, I'll be rolling into the operating room as it finishes. After the surgery, I'll be sure to post a status update on how I am and how everything went on X, and I hope to share the events of the day of and afterward in my recovery in a follow-up blog post.

Update (August 3, 2025): The follow-up blog post, Recovery, is available now.

I was born three weeks prematurely by c-section due to placental abruption, when the placenta, the organ that provides nutrients and oxygen to the baby, disconnects before it is supposed to, caused by preeclampsia, a complication in pregnancy brought on by high blood pressure that can lead to premature birth, a low birth weight, long-term health issues, and even stillbirth. I spent my first forty-eight hours of life in the NICU, the newborn version of an intensive care unit (ICU). I was ultimately diagnosed with left cerebral palsy, a condition that leaves great weakness or paralysis in the right side of the body, tight muscles, walking on tiptoes, poor reflexes, and over-exaggerated body movements, among other symptoms, from damage to the left side of the brain, which, in my case, was caused by a stroke I suffered in utero. Thanks to my cerebral palsy, I walk not only on tiptoes on my right side but also with a great, leaning limp cripple. All my life, I've had to regularly see an orthopedic specialist, get physical therapy, and was supposed to wear an ankle foot orthosis brace that went up to my knee. Before all that, my mother struggled greatly to conceive and spent three and a half years in constant fertility treatments. She and my father tried everything, having escalated all the way up the chain from basic insemination to the last resort of in vitro fertilization, taking every opportunity along the way that their insurance would cover. I began from their very last attempt at IVF, after they had exhausted their insurance, paid for out of pocket by them. As my mother put it, "I fought through hell and endeared hell to have you."

At age twelve, I was diagnosed with cyclic vomiting syndrome after missing outstanding amounts of middle school due to severe nausea and vomiting. For it, I was prescribed Ondansetron, a medication often prescribed to cancer patients that blocks the nausea and vomiting signals your stomach will send to your brain as needed. It helped me subside my vomiting greatly, and the rest of my middle school career and my freshman year of high school flew by without outstanding troubles. My following sophomore year, however, would quickly dissolve into issue. On the weekend of Labor Day 2023, while visiting my grandmother's in downstate Illinois, what started as a slightly less standard bout of nausea one night after dinner and increasingly painful cramps and other bodily pains, as well as great disorientation, became a complete collapse and blackout on the hallway floor just outside of the bathroom. My parents and grandmother were understandably freaked out, and following the weekend, I did not return to school. In November, my diagnosis was officially corrected to postural orthostatic tachycardia syndrome, or POTS, a condition where blood volume is reduced when going from lying down to sitting up to standing up, causing lightheadedness and dizziness, fainting, migraines, disorientation, and rapid heartbeat, among other symptoms. I was eventually able to do my school from home in a program they call homebound tutoring. This program is often used by students who were kicked out of school for bad behavior or who have an exceptional medical need, like pregnancy. In it, you are assigned a tutor who coordinates with your teachers, classes, and school to bridge the content from them to you. I was thankfully in reasonable enough health to mostly sustain that for the rest of the school year, closing with slightly underperforming grades to my usual, but well above passing nonetheless. This year, for my junior year, my parents and I attempted to resecure a spot in homebound tutoring, though, to the notice of my English co-teacher-turned-tutor at the end of last year, the school would undergo significant budget cuts this year after the conclusion of their COVID-19 pandemic relief surplus money, which included cuts to staff, curriculum, among other aspects, that we presume was the cause to my application ultimately being denied. I had to leave my high school in favor of a fully remote, homeschooling-esque option. It wasn't easy on me by any means; being with my local school through all this gave me the reassurance that everything would eventually pan out and be okay with time, but leaving left my entire world shattered in millions of pieces. It was heartbreaking.

All this to say—I've been through a lot, the past few years have been complete mayhem, and I've only just turned 17. It's absolutely unbelievable to say that out loud, given everything I've experienced, yet instead of being out having fun and partying with friends, acting like I'm invincible, as everyone always says, I'm stuck either in bed or on the couch, isolated from the world, with the closest thing to a conversation outside of my immediate family occurring over X, Snapchat or other social platforms. My parents and I have tried time and time again to make the best of it, and on the rare occasion I'm up to it, we do try to get out, whether it be to do a couple of errands around town or going out to eat for dinner, or something more eventful like a few nights out of town at my grandmother's or downtown Chicago for a change of scenery, but regardless of what it is we do or where we go, it's purely a temporary distraction, and these opportunities are increasingly sparse and limited. All the while, I've been barred from much of what I love—my writing, my ever-growing Steam video game library, all my other interests, the great outdoors, and perhaps most importantly, any meaningful communication with the outside world. I used to be so active, outgoing, and social; I used to hold myself to such a high standard, yet, these past couple of years, I've had to completely abandon everything.

I am now in a state where I cannot even sit up at my desk for any extended period, and I struggle with indecisiveness for even the simplest of things. Not much of anything we've tried or done has particularly helped; some have made things worse, and in the face of three MRIs, nothing viewable is wrong with my brain aside from the damage left by my stroke. My body is increasingly rapidly deteriorating because of my crippled walk, and it's becoming increasingly apparent that our only route out now, if there is one left, is a major orthopedic surgery involving the cutting of my Achilles tendon that I'd been brushing off all my childhood. Instead, I underwent a temporary round of botox and casting and refused to wear my leg braces out of discomfort as soon as my mother could no longer force me to wear them. We'd been forced to stop my professional physical therapy in elementary school, and I didn't continue it at home. Every day, I am confronted by dizziness and lightheadedness, disorientation, severe brain fog, rapid heart rate, severe pains in different parts of my body, headaches and migraines, sometimes nausea, and more. I go in and out at complete random of being able to sleep well, and the isolation brought upon me leaves me deeply lonely and sad. What I am going through is miserable; I am miserable, and all the while, my aspirational dreams of what I hope to accomplish in life are further crushed by an industrial press.