Day 4: We're Rollin', rollin', rollin'

Both yesterday and today have been pretty quiet -- same schedule as before: get up, shimmy down the stairs on my butt, and trundle over to the recliner, where I spend most of the day. I've been trying to make sure to get up every two hours or so and move around, but mostly my days have been spent in the chair napping or watching movies.

I've been weaning back from the Percoset during the day, and it's been mostly ok. I have prickles of nerve pain taht shoot through my foot when I move things, but it's minor, and at least I can move my toes now. There was a period on Thursday where I was absolutely obsessed with the thought that I couldn't move my toes -- couldn't move any of my foot, even if I tried. Nothing happened. It's a really strange sensation and it freaked me out a little. I was really grateful when I started having little zaps of feeling in my toes and my foot, even if it hurt.

Mark would walk by every few hours and touch my toes -- to check that they were warm and not too swollen, and to see if I felt anything. I had to tell him to stop (or at least let me cover my eyes first) because it was very disturbing to having him poke at my toes and not feel a thing. It was creepy. And then came the time when he ran his fingers under my toes and it felt like he'd lit them on fire. Ouch.

Well, my toes and the rest of my foot seem to be doing fine -- occasionally there is a numb spot or a weird tingling but I'm attributing taht to swelling and the bandages, really. Nothing too strange. Mostly what I'm feeling now is pressure and heat, and a deep, dull ache in the hell and along my tendon from where he sawed off bone.  It's actually quite tolerable when I'm awake -- an ice pack usually does the trick to keep things from feeling creepy-crawly.  I can tell my foot is pretty swollen just by the pressure of the splint on my foot and the pressure on the ball of my foot.

As far as I can tell, my foot didn't swell up too terribly much -- no sausage toes or throbbing and too-tight bandages. I had it elevated from the moment I got home for at last 48 hours, and I'm still putting it up on a pillow or two when I'm in the recliner. At night, I just prop my whole leg up on a thick pillow. That has really helped -- ice and elevation are recommended for 48 hours and I can't stress enough how important that is. It's hard to find a comfortable position sometimes, since I shouldn't set my foot down so it rests all on the incision, but with the thick splint, I haven't worried too much. I imagine it's a rather kaleidescopic range of blues and purples, though. I tend to bruise really spectacularly. But we aren't supposed to pull off any of the dressing or wrappings until we see the doc next Friday. It's making Mark a bit crazy -- I mean, he's a nurse, why can't he change the dressing and make sure it's ok? But the argument is that it was sterile when they wrapped it, and should remain that way.

I'm down to Tylenol during the day, as I noted. It is enough to take the edge off and is just fine as long as I don't spend too much time with my foot down.  I seem to be ok on the scooter for a while -- we went on a short walk outside today! -- but it's particularly aggravated by trying to sit on the toilet. Go ahead, try it -- try to sit there without resting your foot on the floor! It's hard. One thing that really helps is keeping the walker in the bathroom to help stand up and rest your foot on.

I made the mistake of putting just a teensy bit of pressure on my foot (while sitting) and it  made me yelp. It's definitely very painful and it a good deterrent to even trying that again. I'm noticing a bunch of little twinges today that I'm sure will be showing up with more frequency as I start moving around more. Leaning down without bending my knee is a no-no -- feels like someone is pulling all the skin up over my heel, a very strange prickling sort of thing. Twisting isn't really possible with the splint, but I can feel things shifting about a little. I woke myself up this morning with one of those midde-of-the-night spasms, you know the sort? Where you dream you miss a step or fall or something and your whole body jerks? Yeah, that woke me right up!

A few of the blogs referenced charley-horses and muscles spasms as being pretty common. You can't move from a toe-pointed position, and that tends to cause things to seize up randomly.  My surgeon mentioned it, and they can give me Valium or something to make it less likely, but we decided to wait and see. I haven't had any real issues, other than some random crawling in my calf, so I hope that's it.  I'm sure I'll feel that way until I get the first one and then it'll be all 'bring on the drugs!'.

The one thing that I wish I had thought more about is the rather well-known tendency of narcotic pain killers to stop you up like Hoover Dam. Oh, yeah. Not fun. Definitely take the doc up on the Colace or whatever other options they offer. And take them religiously. And get up and move around more.

I'm still napping at odd intervals -- just dozing off for an hour or so in the chair. I originally told work and the FMLA coordinator that I thought I'd be back after a week, but I think I was being far too optimistic about my ability to concentrate and actually work. Sure, I can sit here, but I get spurts of a few hours being "on", and then I'm exhausted. I'm going to call them and tell them that I'll plan on coming back after my first followup appointment -which is July 10.

The Adorable Husband just went out to get Dairy Queen. He's been so patient and nice about all of this. I've been trying to limit the whinging, but I'm sure I've been demanding and cranky.