Thankfulness

I am thankful for baby wipes, the 'cast condom' and sleep.

Baby wipes:

These things are the only thing keeping my poor toes clean.  I can't get them wet because they are really too close to the bottom of my cast, so I baby wipe them every day or so.  I even painted my toenails for awhile but ended up removing that because it looked so odd when my foot was purple from blood flow.

The 'cast condom' - or a Curad cast protector

This thing is great.  It's a thin rubbery membrane that has a hole at the top that just barely fits over my cast.  You stretch it a bit to make it fit and then it sits tightly against my leg just above the cast.  It's reusable as long as I'm careful.  I've gotten about two weeks of showers out of each one (two in a package).  SOOO much easier than plastic bags and tape!  There are also covers that have a plastic ring at the top, but those wouldn't work for me as I need to be able to kneel in the shower and that ring would make it impossible.  After my shower, I lightly dry off the cover and then hang it from a towel bar until next time.  Thank you, Curad!!

Sleep.

This kind of needs no explanation but I'm going to explain it anyway.  I typically do well on about 7-8 hours of sleep a night.  What I am finding that since the injury/surgery, I needed at least 9 hours and sometimes 10.  I mean, I needed it.  If I only got 8, I was dragging ass all day.  I expect this is from my body's attempt at healing.  But this isn't why sleep is on my list.  Sleep is here because sleep is what I do when I just can't take it anymore.  Sleep gives me sanity.  When I'm asleep, I'm a normal person.  I'm not hobbling, I'm not banging into doors with my crutches, I'm not hopping, I'm in no danger of falling over, I'm not sitting all contorted with my foot in the air, I'm not driving around looking for drive-thrus because I can't carry anything in my hands while on crutches, and most importantly, I'm not thinking about 'how much longer I have to have this stupid cast on my leg/foot'.  I'm just a normal person asleep.  And of course, each night that I go to sleep, I wake up one day closer to my next appointment and possibly a walking cast.  Sleep rocks.

Speaking of drive-thrus...the other day I was laughing at myself when I realized that I needed a drive through  grocery store.  Up until this injury, I spent my life avoiding drive throughs, sitting and parking too close to buildings.  I would intentionally go into restaurants or dry cleaners, stand whenever I could and park at spaces far away from entrances just to give myself more activity.  Now I'm thankful for drive-thurs, chairs and my disabled parking permit.  How depressing.  Thankfully, it's temporary!

Mobility's a B1tch

Tomorrow it will be 5 week since I injured my foot.  That's 5 weeks with zero weight-bearing on it.  I've got a minimum of another 3 weeks and then I'll have another doctor's appointment.  I don't really know what will happen from there but I'm hopeful (without being too hopeful) that I'll get a walking boot of some sort.  We'll see.

In the meantime, I'm beginning to master the ability to be mobile.  When I leave the house, I drive my beat up little 20 year old Honda Civic with my left foot while my right foot remains elevated on the passenger seat.  My crutches fit nicely across the back seat.  When I park, the crutches come out and I can get around at a good clip.  I've developed a pretty decent level coordination with them, and honestly, I don't mind them most of the time.  The greatest problem is that it is virtually impossible to carry anything while 'crutching'.  I've got it down to where I can carry two small things, one in each hand, and still crutch well enough.  This is how I managed to buy a lipstick and a pack of baby wipes at Walgreen's the other day.  (Look for a future post on bathing to learn about the baby wipes!)

Knee Scooter by Drive

When I am at home, I drop the crutches into the corner and jump on the above knee scooter.  I do this because on the knee scooter, I can have my hands more free.  I'm still somewhat limited because it still needs to be steered, but it's better than crutches.  We live in a 1 level ranch that is fairly spacious inside, so I can manouver fairly well.  It is useless in four places - the kitchen where I don't have a good turning radius, going to the basement, my closet and outside.

Hands-free crutch by IWalkFree (rented from Goodbye Crutches)

When in the kitchen, needing to go to the basement, in my closet for any length of time, or outside, I switch to my hands-free crutch.  I actually call it my 'peg leg'.  I had to make some alterations to the platform on which my shin rests to accommodate my cast in comfort, but it works well.  I can walk with it without using my hands (except down stairs...I still need my hands for that) and it works on uneven terrain like the back yard.  It's physically a challenge to operate it...particularly outside, but it makes some things SO much easier.  The only problem is that my leg is wedged in there really tightly, so after a few hours, it aches and I need to straighten it and stretch out.  It really is a HUGE help though and frankly, could be a total game changer for some people.  I haven't felt the need to use it outside the house yet because I'm mostly OK with using my crutches, but I can see how it could be very handy.

While all this is working out OK and generally I'm fine with it, I do miss walking.  I find that sometimes I really need to talk myself off the ledge and think patient thoughts because I've still got a minimum of 3 weeks left and quite possibly more.  This is as much a mental challenge as it is a physical one!

Fun photos for posterity

What my toes looked like while I still had the splint on:

What my new hard cast looks like (sort of - color is a lovely rich purple in real life):

What my foot looks like inside this cast:

What my foot looks like on the inside:

Post-Surgery

Wow.  I have a pretty high pain threshold.  I also have very little tolerance for any narcotic pain medication, so I tend to get pretty stoic about pain.  And for whatever reason, it didn't occur to me how painful a foot could be.  But I'm getting ahead of myself...

I had my surgery on March 15th.  Everyone was super nice and super efficient.  I was highly impressed when Krissy was able to get an IV going on me on the first attempt.  That's never happened before.  Apparently, my veins are 'valvey' which has proven highly painful and annoying in the past.  Not this time.  Smooth as silk except that the IV site did start to ache at one point.  The anesthesiologist was great, too.  I felt like I was in good hands!

I remember nothing of the surgery at all. I awoke with this odd sensation in my right foot, but little awareness to much else.  My doc came by, but I only barely remember the conversation.  He did say that it went well and he gave me two films of the post-surgery xray to keep.  As I became more awake, I realized how nauseated I was.  It got worse.  And my foot started to really ache, too.  Over the course of my recovery, they gave me three doses of whatever pain med was in my IV (it made me loopy and nauseated) and a Vicodin by mouth.  They wanted me to demonstrate that I could eat and that I could pee before they'd let me go home.  By then, my husband was there and he said I looked green.  I managed to put down a little applesauce but kept refusing the offer of crackers or muffins.  When Krissy came back, she remembered that I was paleo and asked if a little jello would be OK.  I agreed since I had to eat something!

My husband eventually got the go ahead to take me home and I spent the whole ride trying really hard not to throw up in the car.  I finally got a chance to look at those xray films and I had THREE huge screws in my foot!  No wonder it hurt like hell - clearly there was some bone drilling going on there.  The nurse said that a slight fever was common with bone work like that but to monitor it and if it went up, to call immediately.  She also said that the pain would get worse before it got better as the localized numbing agent they gave me wore off.  Oh fun.  The doc told my husband that I'd completely torn the ligament from the bone in that joint.

I spent the next 4 days basically on the couch in a lot of pain and trying not to throw up everything I put in my mouth.  I avoided taking any additional doses of the meds and survived on Tylenol and Advil (after approval from my doc).  The foot pain was intense.  I slept in the guest room so that I wouldn't keep my husband up and there was no danger of him accidentally banging into me.

Now it's 6 days post-surgery.  There is still quite a bit of pain, but at least now it's manageable.  Everything that I do takes forever.  Putting away dishes, cleaning the kitchen, showering, cooking, etc.  My husband has been doing it all for days, so I'm trying to pick up a few things here and there, but wow...  I have my crutches that I use when out of the house, and when in the house, I mostly use a knee scooter.  I'll write more on the scooter later, but it allows me more use of my hands than crutches do.

I know that some day I'll both walk and run again...but honestly, that's very hard to even imagine at this point.  Ah well, each day brings new improvements, so I'll survive.  I just need to keep putting one foot in front of the other (so to speak)...right?

Training Plan

I know that my surgery is only two days away, but I can't help but think about how I'm going to get back into shape once this is done.  Many people with similar experiences (and one who is a PT who deals with injury rehab all the time) have told me how important it is to maintain as much of my muscle mass as possible.  My calf is going to wither away to nothing and there is very little I can do about that....BUT, there are lots of things I can do to maintain the rest of my strength.

My plan will be to do a lot of upper body workouts, lots of core stuff and even a few lower body workouts that are floor-based.  I've got one or two from my old collection of FIRM videos/DVD's that I need to pull out.  I also have plans to remain as active as possible.  This means doing a lot of things for myself around the house.  It also means traveling by crutches whenever it is practical to do so.  I may even consider a lunch time walk out around the tiny lake out behind my office building once the weather improves.  I know it'll freak people out to see me out there by choice, but I often freak people out so I'm not concerned. ;-)

It has been a very long while since I've done any workout videos.  Once I've had a chance to preview all the ones I think might work, I'm going to create a little training plan for myself.  I expect that they'll be fairly short in length, so my goal will be do to at least one per day with a pretty significant focus on core stuff.

Someday, I'll get to swim again...but until then, this will have to do.

Hop-along Junker

My commute to work is about 35 - 40 minutes each way.  I live in the country but work in a suburb of Portland, OR.  We have a car and a truck, but both of them are manual transmissions.  My husband works from home, but driving over an hour to take me to work twice a day for months was really not a good arrangement.  We needed to do something!

We talked about me working from home.  I can do that on occasion, but to do that for months would be bad.  I'd be left out of stuff, I'd lose connection with people and frankly, I don't think I'd be all that productive.  I could do some work from home and some where he drove me, but then our schedules would have to mesh and we'd both have very little flexibility.

We talked about renting a car.  Too expensive
We talked about buying a scooter.  Too dangerous because they are heavy and if I leaned to the wrong side, I'd either destroy my foot for good...or destroy the scooter!

The final option was to buy a junker for me to drive.  I spent a lot of time researching cars and decided that I wanted a mid-90's Honda Civic, Nissan Sentra or Toyota Camry.  These cars would get the best mileage, would be the cars most likely to come in an automatic transmission, and would have decent resale.  Of course, thanks to 'Cash for Klunkers'...there are very few cheap daily-drivers on the road anymore.  And the ones that are out there are in demand.

We spent ALL day on Saturday driving around trying to get our hands on a car that would work.  We ended up with a 1993 Honda Civic with 170K miles on it.  It drives fine, but it's a bit on the gross side.  Smells mildewy (common for cars left to sit in this climate for too long), it has no radio, no glove box, no cup holders and the driver's side-view mirror is non-functional and hanging on by electrical tape.  The windshield is badly cracked and it needs a muffler...but it runs!  I drove it to work today and laughed out loud when a full tank of gas was only 8.1 gallons!

So now, I am independent in terms of getting to work.  Phew!

Changing Directions

This blog started out as my way to document my journey for my own purposes as I progressed from a fat farm lady back into an athlete.  Along the way, I lost almost 30 lbs, became a runner, learned to swim again and fell in love with triathlon.  I also changed from a traditional diet to a paleo lifestyle.  In fact, as I began documenting that journey, I quickly found that I didn't have much to write about.  I didn't really struggle.  I embraced it and haven't looked back.


A week ago Saturday, I was carrying a bin of hay (heavy!) out to our goats when two of our three dogs ran into me causing me to lose my balance.  I tried to recover while still holding on to the hay but my right foot slipped in the mud and somehow ended up underneath me, twisted upside down.  I felt a snap.  I screamed in pain.  I laid in the mud while the dogs tried to lick my face, crying.  I had worst-case scenarios running through my pain-addled brain..."I'll never run again!".  Unfortunately, I was closer to correct than I'd like to admit.

That morning, my husband was not home.  I didn't expect him back for about 4 hours, so I knew I had to figure out a way to at least get back in the house.  Turns out, I could move my toes and put some weight on my heel.  That was good enough for me...I finished my chores (the goats still needed water!) by limping my way around and got back inside.  Right then, my husband called asking me to pick him up because he had to leave the truck for work.  I didn't think I could drive (this was my right foot!) but when I tried, it was ok.  I picked him up, we ran some errands and by the time we were done, the truck was done and I drove the car home.  By mid-afternoon, the swelling and pain was too much to bear and we went to the ER.  X-rays ensued and they said I'd broken my 4th metatarsal.

I did a bunch of reading online but it seemed to be pretty rare where someone broke the 4th metatarsal only.  Usually it was the fifth one or multiple ones.  From all the reading I did, I'd convinced myself that my recovery would be simple and short and that I'd only miss a race or two.  In fact, I was so convinced that it would be fine that I walked into the orthopedic surgeon's office wearing a tight pair of jeans because I figured I'd be getting a walking boot that I could remove.  I was wrong.

He had a different story for me.  Yes, 4th metatarsal was broken, but that wasn't the worst of my troubles.  I also damaged my Lisfranc joint and will need surgery.  He couldn't give me all the details because he won't know how bad it is until he goes in there.  The x-ray with me barely putting any pressure on the foot, showed a 3 mm difference between my good joint and my bad joint.  2 mm usually requires surgery.  My separation is probably significant if I could put real pressure on the foot to show it!  They have to essentially put my joint back together and hope it heals properly.  If it doesn't arthritis will ensue and probably necessitate fusing the joint.  If that happens, I will never run again.  BUT, that's getting a little ahead of things.  I have surgery scheduled for Thursday (3/15).  We'll just worry about that for now.

All my runs, triathlons, bike events and hiking trips for the summer have been cancelled.  The sale of our home will have to wait another year.  We have too much to do and there is no way only one person could do it...never mind the actual moving process itself.

The road to recovery will be long.  I will walk it (or crutch my way down it) as best I can.  I will document the journey here.  My goals are to maintain as much of my strength as I can, keep my weight in check (thank heaven for paleo!) and have a quick recovery.  I know my tri season is over.  I assume most of my races are a no go and only expect that *maybe* I'll get to run in the Girlfriends Half Marathon next October.  Again, we'll see.