Well, my doctor’s visit on Friday last week went positively. They took out the remaining stitches and pins/staples giving us a week off from our next visit, so in two weeks I’ll return for another check up. In the meantime, I will have regular physio appointments closer to home.
My physio sessions are starting to get more intensive as increased mobility and flexibility in the ankle and leg muscles for that area need to be stimulated after nearly six weeks of being unused. It is something odd to observe what used to be a fairly healthy and toned muscle waste away into flabby skin and zero resistance.
The therapist said that it takes 100 days to recover from trauma. This is the case regardless of whether the trauma is mental, physical or a combination of the two. A physical injury carries mental trauma even if we do not realize it.
I tend to think of myself as pretty strong mentally and my physical health is fairly good, but it really is unexplainable the toll that is taken on the mind when the body fails to work as it should. Although I do not fear re-injury or doing something that could cause something else to go wrong, I am aware of a greater imbalance in myself than before.
It takes a lot of mental acrobatics to get myself going each day thanks to the extra effort required for showering, dressing, and getting downstairs or preparing to do something productive for the day. By the time, I am “ready”, I generally feel exhausted and have to push myself to keep going. Using the knee scooter definitely makes a difference from the crutches as I can move around to clean up the kitchen or pick up things here and there since a man-clean is not quite the same as a Tara-clean. 😅
Still, I feel impatient to get back on my feet.
Each day, I push a little more than I probably should to exercise my ankle to be in the right position for standing or stretch the toe muscles so that when I get the green light to put weight on it, I’ll be ahead of the training game. Of course, I understand that it is very likely that there is “beating” the game in this case, but at minimum I feel as if I am making the effort and doing as much as I can.
It’s hard to accept that I am only about halfway through the recovery process, but at the same time I hardly feel like it was only three and a half weeks ago that I had surgery. So, with the slow there is the quick. No doubt, in another week or so I will be forgetting that I couldn’t walk. 😬🤪
~T 🔥🐉♋️
