Jun 04 2014
“You walk like a robot,” she said at week 10
I had two visits to PT people last week. I am week 11 as I write this post, and was looking forward to my first PT appointments since start of treatment for which I had to tease out of my OS’s office. I met with two gals last week at facilities convenient to either my workplace or home for initial evaluations. My plan was to try out two PT people on the same day, and then pick one of them to continue with for a few visits.
At the second PT office, I asked the woman who was evaluating me how I was walking. I was in two shoes and had brought my cane to the appointment. I have been using the cane a lot lately as my limp is still pretty severe, I still sense little to no push-off on my bad foot, and I like the idea of the cane as a warning system to types who whisk by me on non-injured feet. She had me walk down the hall and back.
After I returned from the end of the hall in an annoyed tone she states:
“You walk like a robot.” I looked at her and said: “No sh*t. That’s why I am here and you will fix it.” <– disclosure- I didn’t really cuss and say that, but I thought it. The funny thing is that even with that comment she was a little better than the first PT lady, so I am going to have at least one more appointment with her until/if I can find someone better.
While the evaluations turned out to be underwhelming I did learn things from each person. The first person taught me the valuable lesson of using the cane correctly and in the hand opposite to injury, and matching the cane stride with injured foot. She explained that the cane helps guide and balance my weight keeping my upper body (somewhat) centered as I step through with uninjured leg.
The first PT gal measured my ankle (on May 28). Here are the numbers:
The “robot” lady gave me some stretching fabric and taught me toe scrunching exercises for my injured side, which I have been trying to do and finding surprisingly difficult. But then I find them difficult for my uninjured side too so perhaps I should not be surprised. She also insisted that I ice and elevate at least three times a day. Sometimes I only do it once, but I always try to get in at least some daily RICE.
On other fronts lately I have severely slacked off my personal rehab and exercise routine, much to my own dismay. Work got real busy with some crazy unrealistic deadlines, forcing me to abandon my efforts to move all things achilles forward. I had a good talk with my boss today on the technical reasons of why the work is behind, and did mention that my injury/leg continues to be an issue and bog me down to some extent in life, but somehow forgot to mention that I need time to work on rehab and PT. He did promise me a new superfast computer so that I could code at speeds unheard of since the advent of computing. That cheered me up some, but it’s not like the programming tasks are going to magically code themselves. Oh well, somehow it will work out. Maybe I can use my robot instincts to get one thing done automatically while working on the other.
