Ugh!!!! The soft material inside my cast has shifted. It is all bunched up around my ankle and feels like a sock that you just can't pull up from inside a winter boot. I have managed to squish some of the padding back down so my toes stop turning purple but I do need to call the ortho department tomorrow and see what they want me to do. It wouldn't be so bad if I couldn't feel the hard surface of the casting material on my heel.
Oh...a couple nights ago I was crutching around in the dark as I just shut the lights off and was heading into the kitchen before bed when I placed my good foot on what I thought was a bug. I ended up stepping straight on my left heel and it felt like an electric shock had gone right up my heel and into my lower leg. I reached over to the wall and flipped on a light switch only to see that I stepped on a stretched out Slinky. The way the plastic coil rolled under my foot really did feel like a multi legged creature of sorts. I ended up taking Ibuprofen and heading to bed with some pain.
Onto other news. Yesterday I finally started exercising. Since cutting out most all dairy, pops, artificial sweeteners and most things high fat from my diet, I have dropped just under 20 pounds since a week prior to surgery. I figured that I need to keep up the weight loss and kill some time during my days by exercising.
I am doing straight leg lifts in all directions, donkey kicks, co-contractions for quads and hams, push ups, bent over rows and cardio. Yes!!! Cardio without the use of my left foot. Here's the deal. The pictures are on purpose. Way back when I was a student athletic trainer at Wayne State College in Nebraska, I was fortunate to learn sports medicine under Keith Goetz, ATC. Everyone seemed to have a nickname for Keith but I still think "Go Go Gadget Goetz" was the most appropriate. Here's why. See the first pic at the top of my blog? It's an upright bike with the handlebars in the stationary position. If you tilt it back on it's seat and stand, it becomes a UBE, an upper body ergometer. UBE's are rather expensive and so I had to use whatever was laying around.
In college, Keith used to make us work with the budget and recycle things or re purpose items in order to allow the athletes to be treated and rehabilitated from injuries properly. For example, when we needed portable water supplies for practices, some of the student trainers worked with Keith to take old desk drawers from a storage area (now the new and improved stadium at WSC), cut the drawers down to fit a battery source and a pump, place this structure on a standard hand truck or dolly, strap on a water cooler with hoses and voila.... a portable water squirter that we could roll into the recreation center or outside to any practice that didn't have outdoor water supply. I still have some slicky pants with battery acid burns on the front hip and thigh.
Another example was wobble boards. These things are spendy!!! Keith cut a circle out of a board, cut a croquet ball in half and stuck it to the bottom. There was some sort of plastic tubing attached to the underside of the board as well which served as a bit of a cushion. Yeah...if we really needed a piece of equipment, it had to be something old that was re purposed. Good upper back/shoulder exercise would be to kneel on the floor behind a stair master machine and use your hands to press the pedals down. We did that, too. Funny thing is that most of the alternative workouts that I learned in the rehab room at WSC, I used at one time or another or got creative and devised my own killer workout for a client at Bally Total Fitness. It was a great experience I have to say. Thanks Keith.
So anyway, 20 minutes a day on my UBE and I will be able to stand my bike up correctly after this cast comes off for good.
I will be calling tomorrow morning about my ill fitting cast.
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