6 Weeks (post op) - Into A Walking Boot
6 weeks after surgery and into the docs office for my walking boot. The nurse was taking my splint off, and when she got back to the scar site she pulled off that fluffy crap they put underneath the splint and off came a piece of tape. She noticed right away it didn’t look quite right. She cleaned the rest up, and took the rest of the tape off without incident, and got the doc. He said I have a little bit of granulation tissue. Really it just looks like a couple little heads of red cauliflower. He said he’s seen it before but not very often, and found it odd that it didn’t show up two weeks ago at my last doc visit. Only thing I can figure out is he put more tension on the tendon last week, which tightened the skin around the scar site, which for some reason caused this.
Good news is it didn’t prevent me from getting the boot. I’m just supposed to redress the scar twice a day and put on some topical agent they gave me (didn’t look at the name).
He gave me one very basic exercise to perform 6 times twice daily and said see ya in two weeks. WB as pain allows, allowed to shower without boot. I can’t wait to get rid of the extra dead skin.
I got home and decided I was gonna take a few steps in the house in the boot. That wasn’t gonna happen. I guess do to dead skin build up at the heel, it kinda hurts at the heel putting a lot of weight on it. I did partial weight bearing, still using crutches. Tried to work myself up to walking without them, but maybe I was just too chicken. I guess my crutches are my ….crutch. I’ll be working on getting off them in the next day or two.
The amount of dead skin on the bottom of my skin is crazy!! I was hoping to just come home and take a nice hot bath soak to get that crap to loosen up so I could remove it, but after they put the topical stuff on my granulation tissue I figured I’ll just wait til tonight when I need to redress anyway. A little hesitant to submerge my foot with this stuff hanging outside the skin, but doc said it’d be fine.
That’s all for now. Here I thought I’d be walking all over in this boot….not so much. Guess I gotta do my own PT on myself to get walking in this deal. That said, not having a splint/cast is next to bliss.
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Hi aaronjohnson, It talks about four or five days to completely wean off of the crutches when you first get into the boot. It is a huge step and so great to finally not have to use crutches. Hang in there.
Here’s some advice about balancing out your hips while in the cam walker to make walking easier, more comfortable and less likely to cause hip, back or knee problems. I put insoles in my good foot’s shoe to try to balance my hips but that wasn’t quite enough to balance me as much as I’d like. It didn’t make up for the thickness of the sole of the cam walker. So I took my right shoe (good foot) to a shoe repair shop and they put sole material under my shoe until I felt balanced. After these measurements, the shoe repairman added a 3/4″ sole to the bottom of the shoe to even me out. It made walking was so much easier, more comfortable and, the added bonus, I could walk faster with an almost normal gait.
I used an old running shoe that was pretty much worn out since I wouldn’t be able to use the shoe again after I went two shoes full time, which I did a couple of weeks ago. The shoe repair shop simply added the additional ¾” sole to the bottom of my shoe. Because it’s a running shoe, the sole conformed to the bottom of the running shoe and is rounded like the bottom of my cam walker. The result was easy, comfortable walking in the cam walker.
If you check the site, there are other ways to accomplish this proper alignment, but however you accomplish it, it is vital. Raising your good foot to achieve proper alignment allows you to walk correctly and roll over your toe instead of walking like Quasimoto. This will be very important when you make the transition to two shoes. It also minimizes the potential for temporary (or long term) back, hip or knee problems caused by incorrect alignment. And of course, you can walk quickly and comfortably.
Good luck and keep healing.
dear aaron
it also took me 4-5 days to ditch the crutches.
to balance out my gait , i got a pair of these shoes in black :
http://www.payless.com/store/product/detail.jsp?skuId=077526100&productId=67088&subCatId=&catId=cat10376&lotId=077526&category=&catdisplayName=Brands+
my physical therapist is a huge fan of my purchase.
rsn
ruptured it august 3rd, surgery august 5th
cast off sept 7th, now in a boot
+1 to both of those posts. You MUST find a way to balance out the height of your two feet! (JLA, do you have all that text on a hot-key?)
The dead skin under your foot is typical, as is the pain under the heel when first WB. (In fact, everything but the red cauliflower “granulation tissue” is super-normal in our little group. But I can’t believe that the dead skin is the cause of the pain. Au contraire, a thick pad under there should give a bit of extra comfort, but NOOOO! I think I slipped a squishy gel footpad under my foot in the boot for extra padding — though that also means you have to build up the other shoe even MORE!
My PT recommended sitting, taking off the boot, and rolling your/my heel over a golf ball, to give the bottom of the heel a nice deep massage. (If it’s too deep, try another kind of ball.) It seemed to help me. It should pass fairly soon, and I would NOT recommend being super-macho and working through or ignoring that pain, or you might develop a real heal spur, aka plantar fasciitis, which is Not Nice!
Many of us experienced sole and heel-bottom pain again when moving to 2 shoes, and found squishy footbeds or even squishy shoes (aka Crocs) a help.
Mine wasn’t a lingering problem as far as walking was concerned, BUT at NINE MONTHS, I still find that a pair of “massage sandals” (with rubber bumps under-foot) still annoys my injured heel! I used to wear those sandals around the house CONSTANTLY, so this is clearly the last gasp of that same sensitivity.
BTW, I used various kinds of abrasives to remove that extra pad of dead skin under my foot, including pumice stones and one of those Pedi-Egg files (a “cheese grater” for the foot!). I don’t know if that’s a great recommendation or not, given my teeny-tiny lingering sensitivity!
I went non-op and went to full weight bearing around 4 weeks.
The first day of full weight bearing the bottom of my heel felt quite sore, the way it might after standing a long time in flip flops or some other shoe with no support
it only lasted a day or two.
Hi All,
I am two weeks post op. My Specialist put me in a boot 10 days post op and FWB. They feel that this is better for healing. Physio starts soon, I should be back to 100% within three - four months. I have done this before(about 8 years ago) and followed the same regime. I think this time round I will be retireing from Marathons after my next one.
I think it is important that people access a sports specialist and someone that specialises in this type of specfic injury, it will cost you, but, worth the money.
Ask heaps of questions and for what your are paying they should be answered!!
Take care, great site!
Also, how quickly you go to FWB, depends on:
Whether you had surgery
Strength of repair
Type of repair
Your doctors rehab protocol
Your age, health etc
Just do what they say is my motto, unless you have a medical degree and more exp than them - lol