El Andalous - Second Day Post-Cast

Jetty by Il Gusto Beach

The next morning I woke up and felt a slight dread at having to walk when my heel hurt. Again, though, it was short-lived and subsided after the shower.

Today, I was more ambitious and not only unpacked more cartons, but also moved my furniture around as I tried to decide how I would arrange the flat. There wasn’t any point in unpacking my pictures until I knew what I wanted the flat to look like and what was going to go where.

This time, I took very few rests, so I was pretty much on my feet all day and still my foot didn’t hurt. I was so pleased! Of course, I was only on smooth, flat ground, so nothing that ambitious, but it was still better than I could have hoped for. The heel didn’t even hurt any more.

When I rested, again, getting started was difficult and I would have to hobble for a while, but generally, it was all pretty good going.

With the pain in the heel starting to subside, I became aware that the mobility in my foot wasn’t really too bad; it was my calf muscles that were really weak. I had been doing foot exercises at random points through the day and now I decided that actually I should be doing calf stretches, so I added that into the routine as well.

I also began to take my swelling more seriously as I needed to get a shoe on in a few days’ time. I read that the calf’s activity can help to reduce swelling so that gave me a greater impetus to do those calf exercises so that it became more active as soon as possible. I also started to raise my leg above heart level, as so many sites advised. I’d ignored that up to now, but decided if I could get the swelling down this way, maybe it would be easier then to keep the swelling down longer-term. I have to say, I wasn’t convinced that the raised leg really helped, but at least I felt I was doing all I could do to help myself.

I tried on a shoe at one point, but it would be too painful, particularly if you add a flight and extra swelling on top. Even on my OK foot, the shoe was a bit constrictive – I guess I’m not really used to it any more, having been in flip-flops most of the time before my injury. My feet are broad at the best of times and my mum always used to say that I shouldn’t go round in bare feet because it would just make them even broader and then it would be impossible for me to get shoes! Anyway, shoes can be problematic to start with, so with the swelling, it was going to be even more difficult.

On the whole, though, I thought I did extremely well to be on my feet for most of the day with no real pain to report. The evening, of course, I rested, in various poses with my leg at various heights. I was determined to get a shoe on at some point, somehow!