Stitch and Click

Welcome to my life (or at least the interesting bits, which probably relate to photography or knitting)

Name:
Location: Canada

Tuesday, January 23, 2007

Progress

And I seem to have slipped back into the forgetting-to-write mode yet again. Oops. I've taken a few cooking and baking pictures, now I just need to, you know, post them and write about them. Yeah.

So as a first step, here's a look at my pretty purple foot a few days after the break:


Note the classy tracking of the bruising along the big toe, and the classy sausage toes. I thought I'd capture the look for posterity before getting a cast. I was a Good Patient that first week, hopping around on crutches and Not.Walking.At.All. and the swelling went down (really, that's better than it was). Since I had to get back to work I figured I should get a real cast put on, so had that done on the 31st. Except ... well... I'm not sure if the person who put it on had ever put on a fibreglass cast before ... and well... see for yourself:

Note the odd lumpiness and weird twist to my foot. And, yeah, there were weird lumps inside too, digging into the ankle/back of my heel. The good news, though, was that when we actually looked at the Xray copy (that the doc in the city gave me to take home) I realized that the break was actually in the big toe, not the longer bone (the metatarsal). With all the "you must you crutches! This is your big toe, you must not walk on it!" from the first doc, I was thinking it was the metatarsal, which is a worse break. But no, it was on the other side, though going into the joint. So the doc I saw was all "of course you can walk on this!" So I decided to look it up for a tiebreaker vote, and the ortho textbook agreed that for a big toe break it's 4 weeks of a walking cast. So, I walked on it a bit (although for longer distances I used crutches as they were faster), and in about a week had caused the heel to crack apart:

I figured that anything being held together by duct tape probably wasn't the most effective support ever (not to mention the ankle rubbing) and after about a week got it taken off, and switched to this:

which I had leftover from when I broke my ankle a few years ago (I figure once I've paid for the thing I might as well keep it in case ... and good thing I did). The boot is much more comfortable and easier to walk in (ditched the crutches two weeks ago), and allows me to take it off and wiggle my ankle a bit. It's surprising how quickly you lose muscle mass - after two weeks in a splint/cast my calf had turned to jello ... nasty. After a few days of doing some ankle movements (keeping my toe still - really) it was a little less pathetic.

My four weeks are now up (as of a few days ago) and I'll have a followup Xray/visit this week and am fairly sure that I'll be set free. The broken part of the toe doesn't hurt, but the other side of the big toe must've had a nasty sprain, since it's still stiff and sore if I move it. As long as the bone's healing reasonably, though, which I think it is, I think I can at least get the boot off. Here's hoping!