My foot seems to be a giant ball of confused nerves (go figure). So I was afraid that the rain from the shower might be painful. It wasn't. But when I rearranged my leg and water ran down the back of it over the suture line, it felt like my whole leg and foot were asleep. It wasn't necessarily painful, but it also wasn't comfortable.
At the end of my shower, I was kind of nervous, because I had to hop, without much to hold on to, back to my crutches. I had to crutch out of the shower to the floor mat, grab my towel off of the bathtub and towel dry there. I was nervous that I would slip on the wet tile and fall, but it worked out okay. I still don't think I'll fell safe to shower at home without a "back up" person being home.
Anyway, I dried off my hair and upper body and then I crutched out of the bathroom to the bed to sit down and dry my bum leg and foot. I wanted to be sure I got all the water out between my swollen toes, so I wouldn't get gross stuff growing in there. But my main concern, and I knew from X-man's cast experience that this was going to suck, was that all of this nasty skin was peeling off of my leg and the bottom of my foot. Like 4 weeks worth of skin that normally flakes off your body without you noticing was stuck in the cast and just became layer after layer.
Putting my foot into the boot is okay, as long as I'm not trying to put my foot up. If I elevate my foot, it feels like the boot is restricting my foot. Like it's a giant squeeze machine. So, I put it on when I'm up and about (it doesn't seem to hurt then) and I do my flex/ point exercises when I'm elevating it.
For some reason, by the end of the day, it feels like my foot is going to burst out of a very tight skin. Not cool.
However, my left foot feels much better today because we got the okay to get me a Roll-A-bout cart. MacTroll ran over to rent one from Carle Medical supply. It's a lot easier than the crutches and I don't feel like I'm going to fall over. It works now that it's okay for me to be more mobile. I still have two more weeks of non-weight bearing, but I'm starting to get more "Loosey's afternoon out" experiences and I'm okay with them (i.e. I can sit in a restaurant for up an hour without being in crazy pain, and that's a good thing!). It'll also be my only wheels for a while. I don't see the doctor again until Nov. 7. I might be driving shortly after that period.
When my left leg starts to get tired, I can only make it up a certain number of stairs hopping on one foot. I get scared (like I'm going to fall backwards) when I'm about three away from the top of the stairs. I also get pretty tired after being out of the house for more than an hour. I'm hoping that the Roll-A-bout allows me to be more mobile without me totally misaligning or breaking the rest of my body to make up for the giant cast weighing down the heavy leg that I'm not about to use.
The scooter is parked down on the first floor. I use crutches only when I'm up on the second floor. But I do have to say, if you have a busted leg, X-man is VERY nice about running ahead and getting doors for you, or pushing the handicap button so they open automatically. It's really very sweet.
This is an updated look at my foot from today. It is swollen, but I also have always had kankles... so it's really not too bad. It's a lot of Steri strips. In addition to feeling like my skin is too tight in the ball of my foot, I also think that my arch is now higher in my left than my right, and that I somehow got some kind of callous on the ball of my foot from the hard cast rubbing against it.
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