Broken Ankle Week 15

The kind ER doc drew on a paper towel for me to more simply explain my ankle situation

Walking is amazing! Even the very slow turtle walk I do. I’m walking around inside my house without crutch or cane. I use crutches outside. Inside feels safer because there is furniture nearby to collapse on if it all becomes too much.

I have a few goals for the next month-ish:

• Go for a walk through golden gate park with my wife.
• Climb 3 flights of stairs to see my daughter’s new dorm.
• Walk up and down the hilly sidewalks outside my house. Realizing I still can’t walk down the hill to the mailbox made me feel so disheartened. This injury is still challenging my mental health.
• Stride through an airport and take a short flight (for a work trip planned in October).

There’s a disappearing ink tattoo with the date May 26, 2022 on my thigh above my injured ankle that helps me reflect on recovery progress. I looked at it recently and remembered the kind funny ER doc who reset my ankle. When he only had the x-ray image on his phone and I couldn’t see/understand it very well, he drew it out on a paper towel to help me understand the complexity of the injury.

Discomforts

• New different sensations at incisions. Physical therapist suggested massaging them more. I massage the incisions as much as I can stand it because touching the incisions feels wierd.
• If I don’t do range of motion and stretching exercises at start of day then my ankle is more achy and swollen during the day. Lesson learned!
• Waking up at night to stretchy tight feeling on tibia incision (not as much on fibula incision) and super short spurts of pain in tibia. That same short sharp tibia pain happens sometimes with stretching. I’m hoping this all goes away with time.

Improvements

• I am now walking up and down all the stairs in our house! I fell down one of the stairways and I could walk up it but had too much anxiety about walking down it. A few days ago I said to myself, “fuck it, just do it” and then took some deep breaths and I did it. And now I can do it all the time.
• Using our Schwinn Classic Cruiser exercise bike, I’m doing 30 minutes at a time at low resistance (and binging shows on my iPad). This feels like it is helping make weight bearing easier.
• Almost all the feeling is back in my foot and ankle and it’s not as tingly as it used to be.
• This Prostretch rocker is super helpful to stretch out tight ankle and then compare it with my non injured ankle. I see how far I can stretch on non injured and then how far with injured and can see progress.
• Plantarflexion is almost the same on both feet/ankle now. I’m working on calf and achilles stretches to get dorsiflexion back.