Broken Foot, The Final Step: Two Shoes

In what will be one of the last big recovery steps from the five fractures in my foot, I'm wearing two shoes as of Saturday morning. Happily this was not as challenging as going from no weight to walking in the cast - which was basically learning to walk all over again. At first I thought it was not even hurting and then after five minutes my foot was pretty grumpy, I immediately went in and took some pain meds and despite the meds it is pretty painful. But it's moving, working and I'm walking so this is great.

I'm being reminded again that one has to take thing slowly. I'd love to just run off into the sunset now but after just a couple of hours on my feet it was pretty obvious that this is going to require lots of ice, ibuprofen and patience. I'm not just going to be on the go-go all day on my feet right off the bat.

Gosh I'm impatient. Maybe it's just because so much of my life has been on hold for the better part of five months now. But I have to say, I made it! I got through 12 weeks of non-weight-bearing, learned to walk again, suffered through a LOT of pain, slept with my foot up on four pillows for over 100 nights, sat and watched people do things I wanted to be doing, fell hard on my crutches once and had one crash on my scooter, shed a few tears along the way and continued to smile and laugh my way through difficult times.

The gifts I received along the way were lessons in patience, enduring pain and suffering and learning to improvise in a million ways so that I could make things less painful and less difficult. I learned to ask for what I needed. I learned to let other people help me, I learned to receive service gracefully and I learned that there are good people everywhere who will see you and reach out to help if you let them. I probably said "thank you" at least a million times in the past few months.

One thing that is weird is now I'm not the girl in the cast anymore. I became known to so many people at my local stores where we shop, downtown where I work. You can imagine the first thing that started just about every conversation I've had over the past few months was either "what happened?" or "how is it going with that leg?" I had so many strangers asking me when I was going to get out of that cast. Now I'm just back to a regular person who just walks a little oddly. It's strange how much that cast, and the crutches and scooter became part of my identity. It's a little weird to feel like I need to reinvent myself a bit or rediscover who I am now after thousands of conversations about my foot seeming to dominate every human interaction I've had in 2016. As weird as that sounds it really is true.

I have a list of rehab exercises I need to start doing and I am trying to talk walks as much as possible now. I think I will start swimming again because I feel like that would be a great workout for not only my foot but my entire body. I may start out wearing fins. A swim teacher I had once taught us to use our fins sometimes because it helped create a fluid rhythm to our strokes. I think it would help both take some of the pressure off my foot and at the same time really help with it's flexibility and strength.

I am still learning to take it slowly and not over do it. That seems to be one lesson I started to learn this past few months but still have a lot way to go at. I like to move fast, do lots of things and stay busy. Somehow I have a feeling the universe will keep giving me experiences to work on that skill. That's how it seems to work. Haha.

I'm going to go take a little rest off my feet right now. Seems like the right thing to do. I'm working on a few posts that I will share with you soon, one from our yard on my first adventure out, a little shoe shopping inspiration and I'm working on a wrap up of all the good things I learned from my broken foot. I found other's articles on that topic to be invaluable to me, so I definitely want to pay it forward and share some life hacks and survival techniques I learned. I also have some musings on home decor to share. Sending you my best wishes. Thanks for coming by!