Free at last

I am cast free.  I have a huge boot that is on for 6 weeks during the day and a much lighter weight splint at night that I absolutley am not allowed to put even a touch of weight on.  With the boot I can wean down to walking without it.  I can do that in my apartment but I need the crutches for stairs, uneven surfaces, and any long distance.  It feels very strange and off-balance but that's improving and I bet I'll be off crutches in 2 weeks or so.  I am starting PT on Tuesday.

The skin was disgusting.  Michal I kept thinking about Kyle's pedicure.  I couldn't do that because my incision isn't completely closed but I made my own variation at home.  It took an hour or more to soak off most of the nasty skin and hack off the hair on my leg.  I am not a very hairy person; I can't imagine what it would be like if I were.  This is really gross so be forewarned but the feeling I'd been having of something sticking to me, well, it wasn't steri-strips.  There was a huge ball of dead skin loose in my cast and when it got sticky from wound drainage it was sticking to my skin.  In the arch my skin had gotten so tough that it feel like something was there and it was really just layers of dead skin.  But all of that is gone, more or less, and my steri-strips are gone.  It is healing well and my doctor is pleased with the amount of swelling/bruising.  The swelling is decreasing daily now that I am moving it a little.  And I have more movement than I expected.  Not enough to be functional but enough to see it move.  And it moves without deviating from the path it should take until the muscles get tired and even then it isn't nearly as bad as it was before.

I am so excited to start PT.  I actually am really looking forward to having to stretched.  It will hurt badly but it feels like it needs to be stretched. I don't know how to explain that aside from the feeling your back needs stretched so you reach way up.  I am very leery of the day that I put weight on it without the boot but I doubt that happens immediately. 

After 6 weeks of boot and PT I go back and will start transitioning to a shoe.  I will be at 16 weeks then.  So by 6 months I should be pretty functional.  It's mostly hard right now to believe that it is able to hold and that I'm not going to immediately sprain it if I put weight on it in the boot (which I am learning to trust because it is so sturdy) or that I can EVER wear a shoe and not have it give out constantly.  But that exact thing should be my Christmas present.

Anyway time to try to sleep.  Geraldine's birthday party is tomorrow so I have to get up early and so hopefully I'll get some sleep.