It's been eight days since my injury, and my slow, pronounced limp has become a somewhat faster, barely visible limp. Going up and down stairs is no longer the chore it had been, and I'm beginning to wonder, with the rapidity of my improvement, whether this was really a stress fracture at all. I'm done with physical therapy; I've used up my three days of special meds. I haven't done any ice-water soaks for my foot yet, but I'm wondering whether I even need to. Back when I was sure this was a stress fracture, I assumed I'd need a whole month before I could walk any significant distances. I'm still feeling a bit too sore and tender to try walking home (a 30-minute stroll from the office when I'm injury-free), but I might try such a walk sometime next week.
The only reason I haven't completely dismissed the stress-fracture notion is that my foot is still swollen, and that has to mean something. The swelling has gone down enough for me no longer to need a sandal for my right foot: I'm back to wearing two shoes again, like a regular person, and slipping my right foot into my shoe isn't particularly painful. But the swelling is still there, and its presence wordlessly urges caution: I shouldn't get cocky.
I've spent this week basically being self-indulgent and lazy: I haven't been walking at night, and I took myself off my diet last week, so I can see my face visibly fattening up every time I look in a mirror. Now that I've fed my boss and coworker their boeuf bourguignon, though, I've resolved to get back onto my diet next week, with this coming weekend as my "last hurrah" before returning, sadly, to the monastic life. I have some thoughts on what it means to fall off the diet wagon, but I'll save those thoughts for a different post.
Sounds like progress for sure. What can you do to prevent a recurrence?
ReplyDeleteI'm probably going to reduce my walking schedule to what it used to be, i.e., walking roughly every other day to allow for a bit of recovery. Things went to hell only when I chose to move to a six-days-per-week schedule.
ReplyDeleteI do wonder why this injury didn't occur during my long walks, but one possible answer to that question is: maybe it did, but on a small enough scale that it merely registered as generic pain and nothing more. (That would also explain the lack of swelling during my walks.)