to sprain my ankle. Not badly, but enough that I'm spending the next several days icing and hoping my stomach, irritated by all the Seroquel I take, will tolerate the extra anti-inflammatories. It's frustrating and a little scary and it hurts. In a way hurts is the hardest because I've fought through a lot of pain to get here and I don't really care to go through more.
It happened so easily. I do an exercise in PT that involves standing on a wobbly thing and doing squats. It's hard and makes me nervous so when I did one squat and moved my feet without coaching Wednesday my PT commented on how well I had done with that. After that exercise I adjusted my brace and said it felt like it was swelling a bit. Which happens. Later that day it started to hurt and kept getting worse until it kept me up part of the night. I went to PT again Friday and we kept it very basic and still got it angry. So I'm resting it and if it's still angry Wednesday the PT will call my orthopedist. Hopefully it will be fine by then.
It's scary because it took so little to hurt it. All I really did was slide my feet against friction. I didn't roll it that I knew about, I had my brace on, and it didn't hurt any more than usual at the end of the session. But the ankle hasn't had to do much work (hasn't been able to do much work) in the tiny movements to correct balance in 5 years so those are a big deal right now. And apparently they are enough to injure me a bit.
It will all be fine. At the worst they'll put me back in the boot for a little bit. PT will go a little longer because I'm losing time with this but that's ok; I expected PT to last until about the end of January anyway because I was on track to be done around the time I finish with ortho (Dec. 31st) and I want another few weeks of working on balance and safety with no brace because it has been so long since my ankle was on its' own. PT is not horribly expensive with Medicare and I get a 20% discount for making payments up front which is really nice and brings my sessions down to what they tell me will be about $8/session. For a strong, healthy ankle I can come up with the money for those payments.
Nonetheless this is sobering. This surgery is supposed to be 6 months to be in pretty good shape, 12 months for full healing. I can see that clearly at this point. I'm clearly not going to be all better in 6 weeks and I seriously doubt I'll finish PT before about 8 months out. I started at 11 weeks. Needless to say everyone at the PT place knows my name by now.
I think it also didn't hit me until today that my psych meds make this harder. Psych meds distort balance. Benzos distort balance and I take a good size dose of those daily (and have been refusing to take the additional dose of valium that I need to sleep well because of fear of falling). Balance is my hard thing. In fact right now they seem to be scheduling me only with the male PT and I think that is because I've fallen once and needed to be caught a few times and the PTA is tiny (and thanks to the psych meds I am not). I have been doing great in PT but balance stuff has not had the same progress. I guess I should bring up the meds effect because the PT probably isn't experienced to know that the list of meds I take means bad balance. In fact all this happened (in a way, it was going to happen eventually because I had so many sprains anyway, but the date it occurred) was because my balance was off from starting Emsam and then complicated by my blood pressure being lower on it and needing more benzos while my body adjusted to what is essentially a form of slow-release speed. I got out of the car too quickly and didn't wait for my balance to be stable and stepped on something and over I went, not helped by my clogs. I keep trying balance and I know that I'm struggling because we try the hard thing every week or so and then not again for several sessions. I did fall doing it once and have lost my balance a lot of times doing it and have corrected or been corrected by just a slight touch, but it is not coming as fast as strength and ROM did; I flew through those things.
Oh well. This will heal and someday will be just one more little part of this saga.
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This things always take more time to heal anyone wants to hear- but I'm sure you know that. I think I am always telling that to my patients- you had major surgery/you broke a bone/you had this injury for a long time, etc. It is going to take time to get better.
Can they kinesio tape your ankle for the swelling? Also- do they have cold laser there? We really like it for soft tissue injuries. Unfortunately, I think that only the higher wattage units do very much and they are pretty pricy. Ours goes up to 10W, and we are always fighting over it. I have no idea how we convinced our hospital to get it- it cost $25,000.
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