My son sprained his ankle a few days ago, and I’ve been making QOD photos, mostly for my own amusement. No fracture, and he’s doing fine, by the way.
Looking these over it occurs to me that I have several ED visits for concerns about the bruising following sprains.
So, without further ado:
Day One. Lateral ankle swelling (no bruising, trust me).
Day Three:
Day Five:
So, bruising happens after ankle sprains.
No fracture – so it was imaged? Curious about the mechanism of injury and application of the Ottawa rules – did he meet any of them or not?
Pretty impressive bruising – makes me think there was velocity involved in the trauma. I’ve sprained my ankle and not had near the bruising.
BTW – glad to see JCAHO rules re: abbreviations are not in force here. I’m tired of getting harrassing emails about using QD, MS, QOD etc in my progress notes.
I have found the Ottawa ankle rules not very useful in the ED as patients leave very upset that “the dumb doctor didn’t even x-ray my ankle!”.
While on AD, I was bragging to the CAMPEN EM docs that “I’m using the Ottawa Ankle Rules”, and they immediately said “stop it!”.
?Why?
Because when they get off work they come down here to get an xray!
So, I just xray it.