Road to Recovery

I am now one-week post surgery and am beginning to feel the extra pounds around my mid-riff. While being fairly active prior to the injury, I resigned myself to a week of bed rest post surgery. Despite the limited movement around my apartment on the crutches, I did not risk (or will) any further exercise. Needless to say, comfort food was part of the recovery protocol for me — sadly, now I’m feeling the pain of having to lug around my extra weight on these crutches!

Speaking of lugging extra weight around, the biggest physical and psychological issue at this point of recovery is the inability to use your arms/hands. As I mentioned in an earlier blog, I am an unfortunate second-time rupture’r (last time right leg, this time left, and both playing squash!). My hardest memories from the last injury, over 8 years ago, was being unable to take care of myself. At the time, I was at business school and relatively independent/infallible prior to the injury, so the psychological effects of having to ask for help and crutch my way around campus were tough. This time round, despite being in much different personal circumstances now (not living in a dormitory, family to help, my own apartment, etc.), the psychological dependency issues still remain. So, what have I done about it? Since, my last injury I noted a number of new “inventions” have emerged that supposedly help people in our unfortunate situation. I refer specifically to those crutch-less crutches. After some research (primarily on these blogs), I dived in and bought the following two items (I didn’t get a wheely crutch as I didn’t want to be too lazy spinning around).

1) one-crutch (www.onecrutch.com)
and
2) i-Walk-Free (www.iwalk-free.com)

I plan to use these to help me bide the time at home and potentially find a way to get around more conveniently when I am outside.

I’m only one week post surgery (and still in a hard cast), so I’ve spent most of the week on pain-killers and with leg elevated, but my initial reactions from my limited use of these crutches have been mixed:

The one-crutch while simple in design, is a heavy piece of metal, that I feel I could have put together in a metal-work shop. It screws onto your (under-arm) crutches and supposedly you put the weight of your injured leg onto the one-crutch and have no need for the other. So far, I’ve found it to be a heavy crutch and very awkward to move around. It was $50, so I suppose it was good value for money, but I think I’m going to need a lot more practice to be as smooth as the guys on their web-site cruising around.  At least, it is easy to take on and off and is does not look like an alien-attachment….

I had high hopes for the i-Walk Free (especially since it retails at $400) and the web-site speaks wonders about it. If you watch the media video on the web, you I had to believe a young-ish athletic man can at least walk as well as the lady presented in their video?! Well, I have failed miserably on this belief to date. There is a lot of time and attention needed to alter the i-Walk Free device to your personal dimensions and perhaps I have not yet got mine correct. While liberating me to balancing on both legs (or one real leg and one peg-leg), I have found when walking, I need to move with a very wide stance (western style) and over-exaggerate lifting my good leg to move forward “smoothly.” Anyway, it’s early days yet, and despite some lower back pain from the awkward jagged movements, I have at least had some luck doing basic tasks with my i-Walk (e.g., making bed myself, getting stuff from the fridge, making tea/coffee, organizing my closet!). Normally, I wouldn’t do any of these tasks when I had both good legs, so I’m glad to say this injury is already making me into a better person!

More to report on the crutches and my improvement/practice in future posts.  Wishing all other ATR’s a continued successful recuperation in the meantime.

The "crutchless" crutches!