Month: November 2015

TWO STEPS FORWARD AND ONE ST…er fall, BACKWARDS!

My physical therapy is coming along great!  But I did have one fright that had me thinking I’d ruined everything!  I was in the bathroom and had the walker off to the right side as I fumbled with my belt.  I wasn’t wearing my big clonky boot so was standing on just the right foot…I started to lose my balance, and, you ought to know, that once you start “timbering” (falling over like a tree!) you need to grab something QUIK!! Well, since I was (rather inconveniently) falling in the opposite direction of the walker, I grabbed the next, nearest thing, which is this little shelving unit that holds cutsey toiletries…but IT started to fall over too!  So, I did what was natural and instinctual and plonked my left foot down, hard, in an attempt to stop the fall.  My recently reconstructed foot…my foot that I am only allowed to put 50% of my weight on.  Yeah, THAT foot! I immediately went “ACK!” and stepped off it again right away, which sent me off on my way to complete the mission: FALL!  Sigh.  Of course I landed on this little ceramic jar that broke in the fall and scratched and bruised the hell out of my thigh, but I only had one concern, my foot!  What if I re-broke the bones??!!  What if I broke some of the many screws that are setting the bones??!!  It was Friday night, so of course I had to live in tormented wonder till Monday morning when I could get in to have X-rays taken. THANK THE LORD, everything looked fine!  I cannot tell you what a relief that was!  I was thinking how awful it would be for my foot doctor if I ruined his superb work with one miss-step!  How awful for me, too, of course, if I had to start all over again, with what? Another surgery, or perhaps have to have the amputation after all?  Well, those were my thoughts all that weekend, as you can imagine!  But I guess it is like my mom said, my foot is tougher than I think!

My therapy is going really well though, and my therapist had told me I could walk, with the walker, about 20 feet a day.  But I am like a locomotive, “full steam ahead”, so naturally I went for about 80 feet.  Then one day I took my nephews to go feed the ducks and decided I would walker along the path…to the tune of about a 1/4 mile!  Yeah!  Can you even imagine I would finally come to this point where I am actually walking along?  Albeit, it is with the walker, and I am terrible slow.  And I have to off-put most of my weight onto the walker, and not my foot…but how freaking miraculous!  You too my fellow Charcoter’s, will reach this point in your progress, too!  If you follow all the rules, and make sure you really stick to the non-weight-bearing while your foot heals up, that is!

Next week they are upping my weight bearing to 75%…and a few weeks later, full weight bearing!  I cannot even imagine how that will feel, I am scared as hell of doing it, afraid to re-break my foot.  But, all this weight-bearing that I am now doing has been making my foot stronger, actually…so hopefully all will go well.  I will keep you posted!

-Cassandra, CharcotChaCha, copyright 2015