Day Five: call him "Steve".You might have heard Andrea commenting in the video (last post) about how many questions I ask her on a daily basis. She only *thinks* I ask a "lot" of questions. If she knew how many I hold back, she'd probably quit!
I've had several people ask me why I'm meant to limit my time on the leg each day. This is to allow for a few things to happen:
a) toughen up my stump and desensitize those nerve endings slowly
b) strengthen my leg muscles without straining them
c) keep me from developing a bad habit from over-doing it to a pain-point
I can't wait to actually put this thing to good use. It's still quite awkward right now but I think I'm already improving a lot. I'm down to one cane most of the time and that's just for balance when I stumble, etc.
Walking around the Southbank markets on Friday night and having an ice-cream went very well. The only trick is now there's not a lot of indication to others that I'm not so stable. The crutches were more obvious so people gave me lots of space; the canes are subtle so I got jostled more than once. No problem, Steve (my leg) and his sidekicks (the canes) held me up just fine.
The canes also keep me from falling down when I suddenly do something painful that I don't expect to hurt. I'm learning very quickly what those things are... rotating/pivoting in the socket: ouch!
The nice thing is that I'm up to three hours in the morning and three in the evening already, so at six hours a day, the volume of information I'm processing is huge and the learning curve is being whittled away at a nice pace.
Steve the stunt double needs a few adjustments but I'll be in to see my tailor in the morning so it's all good!
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