Week 9 - two shoes
It is week 9 and now starts the transition out of the boot. Tuesday I put on my left shoe and walk around the house, a real morale booster! Very unsteady at first but daily it seems my tendon is getting more used to stretching and the calf is waking up. I’ve added calf raises to my daily workout. I bought a range of motion (ROM) boot on ebay last week and believe this will help with this transition during the next few weeks. Tuesday I set it to 15 degrees planterflex and 0 dorsiflex but now have it set to P= 22.5 and D= 7.5 degrees. I can walk naturally with this boot set up with no strain while definitely feeling my calf pushing off with each step. I limp noticeably without the boot but this is decreasing a little each day. It finally feels like I have 2 feet rather than one foot and a club.
My PT sessions always start with 15 minutes on the exercise bike so I bought one on Craigslist. Now I start every day this way. It feels great to break a sweat. Yesterday I started biking without the boot.
So that’s the progress, I hadn’t managed everything the last few weeks as well. During week 6 things were progressing nicely so I predictably pushed things a little further, maybe too far. I took off the boot and walked around all evening this way with no apparent ill effect. This was satisfying. Two days later I walked 2 miles in the boot, a slight increase over the 1.75 miles I had been doing the previous few days. That night the pain, the types I hadn’t felt since before surgery, increased and I feared I had gone too far and done some damage. I went back to the crutches until my next doctor visit to be safe. Fortunately the doctor said everything looked fine and asked me “exactly which part of take it easy do you not understand”. I’ve been more careful since then.
