Day 122: Four Months Out

[truepenny]

This is the four month anniversary of me breaking my ankle, so I thought I'd do one more post about it and then let it subside into the background unless something particular happens.

So, four months out, where are we?


My ankle is still stiff and painful; I can almost but not quite get a flat line along the top of my foot when I point my toes (which I can do easily on the left, for a benchmark). I now can go downstairs foot over foot, although I take it slowly and lean heavily on the banister--and am likely to resort to the one-step-at-a-time method it if my ankle is already crabby. Most of the pain is coming from the tendons directly behind the two knobs of my ankle, with some back-up from my Achilles tendon. Some days I also have pain from the mortis-and-tenon part of the ankle (the talus bone) not quite mortising. (My physical therapist warned me about this, that it can take some time and work to get the talus back the way it should be.) I now can break into a jog if I have to, although it's not fun. It's still painful to walk properly, with the weight rolling through the big toe; up until last weekend, I would have said the pain was steadily decreasing, but Saturday and Sunday I was in considerable discomfort, more than I had been for several weeks, including some extremely unpleasant cramp-like twinges. I still haven't figured out what caused that.

There's also an odd spot along the suture scar on the inside of my ankle that is refusing to heal. Both my physical therapist and my orthopedist's PA said it was probably an interior suture that hadn't dissolved, and that it would work its way out, but it shows no sign of doing so. It's much less irritated now that I've stopped wearing the compression stocking, but it's still there. I will be mentioning this again when I see my orthopedist this Friday.


Essentially, what I'm dealing with now is less the break per se and more the accompanying sprain, plus the six weeks of immobility. Progress is discernible, but frustratingly slow. I still don't feel like I'm safe to drive, which is probably the worst of it.

Also, of course, I'm still fighting with the RLS. Sunday and Monday nights were rendered hellish thereby; I don't know about last night, because I just avoided going to bed until two. The ropinirole seems to be sometimes helping and sometimes not so much; it's much more reliable about making me queasy. This is not exactly what you call win conditions here.

So, things are much better than they were at 3:52 p.m. four months ago (much better), but I'm not all the way back yet.

And there you have it.

Comments

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Compare leg musculature. When I sprained my knee two years ago, within the first *month* I lost about an inch in diameter on the affected thigh. All muscle. Lower leg muscles had no visible losses.

The much bigger and totally invisible loss was pretty much all my stabilizing muscles atrophied in the affected leg. Gone. Totally. I got them back enough for biking within a year. I'm only now getting them back enough to be as active as "normal".

My thigh muscle didn't completely grow back until around August this year.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

My thigh muscles stayed even, but my right lower leg was this terrible stick-like travesty when they took the cast off. It's much better now, but I'm still visibly lopsided.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

Ugh!

What I found is I didn't really start feeling comfortable and ok until the muscles were back. I love my muscles! I neeeeeed my muscles! And I kept finding new ones that had gone missing, for over a year after I was nominally better.

I will hope yours grow back faster than mine.

[jade-sabre-301.livejournal.com]

as someone who had knee surgery last February and isn't exactly convinced it worked, I am at once comforted by your words (oh! the fact that my thigh went from "no muscle" to only "baby tiny itty bitty muscle" over two months of lots of therapy is normal!) and also really worried (shit if I have to do this again it's just going to get wooooooooooooorse), but at least nominally--prepared?

so thank you for that.

[torrilin.livejournal.com]

We-ell... keep in mind my normal is biking 40-70 miles a week, walking around 15-20ish, and not ever using a car, so lots of random weight lifting of groceries. Not hideously athletic, since I'm not worried about "better times" or longer distances particularly... but not NOT, since well, it's nice to get grocery shopping done quickly and not be exhausted.

My knee didn't really flip over from feeling weird to normal until two things happened: I did my first overnight bike trip, and I started ballet classes.

The thing I've found most annoying is everyone tells you knee injury recovery is long and hard, but that's it. It's long and hard because your muscles do a huge share of the work with the knee joint, and you have muscles halfway up your back and all through your feet that are critical to having a normal feeling knee... and if you stop using a knee, EVEN THE ONES ON THE GOOD SIDE SLACK OFF. It's crazy. And you can *look* like you're moving normally, and maybe even feel like you're moving normally... but not be using the muscles you should. And then you are exhausted and wobbly all the time.

It sucks.

[girlpunksamurai.livejournal.com]

Stuff like that takes forever to heal

Osteoblasts have to form at the break and make new bone and meet in the middle with the other side of the break's osteoblasts. We won't go into osteocytes as it has nothing to do with this tidbit :] But I'd get plenty of calcium and phosphates in your diet because that promotes bone strength and growth.

Anatomy and Physiology; looks like that stodgy bastard managed to teach me something after all O.o

[ashnistrike.livejournal.com]

I am so very glad that you are doing better, even if 'better' is relative. Hope that, as everything else improves, the RLS will either Shut The Hell Up Already, or you will find a more consistantly useful treatment.

-Nameseeker