Skip to main content

Both Feet on the Ground

My mother is one step closer to walking again.

Four years ago, my mom had back surgery, which started a chain of disasters: she developed deep bed sores from lack of care, she was assaulted in a rehab center, and she ended up in a wheelchair. One of the sores was on her heel, and so even putting weight on that foot was out of the question.

My mom's heel pretty much healed in July. There was a scab on it until a few weeks ago, but no depth to the wound. With the scab gone, one roadblock to walking again is gone.

The other roadblock was that she couldn't put her heel all the way down to the floor. Being in a wheelchair for four years, her muscles had tightened and atrophied. My parents and I discussed three options:

  • One doctor recommended making a small incision in the leg to either stretch or cut a tendon or muscle, allowing the heel to move downward. (Isn't that what some people have done to racehorses to end their careers?)
  • Another doctor wanted to fit a boot to Mom's foot, along with wires actually going into the foot, and making adjustments over time to stretch the foot. Given that my mom had a sore on the same foot that took three years to heal, Dad and I thought this was a bad idea. So did Mom's general practitioner.
  • My idea: if you can stretch the muscles by wearing a boot, why can't you stretch them with stretching exercises?

Physical therapy had helped with this while my Mom was a rehab, and at home she'd worn a brace that helped also. But with the sore on her foot healed, she started doing more stretching exercises at the kitchen sink for ten minutes a day, along with doing some light work standing up. Over the past few weeks, I've also been leading my mom in Slow Burn resistance training. (She even bought some two-pound free weights.) Dad and I have encouraged her to walk with a walker and stretch her muscles. I know from my experience with turf toe how quickly muscles weaken when they aren't used: when I resumed serious dancing a month after my injury, I was amazed at how much strength I'd lost in my feet. Mom still needs to develop a lot more strength to walk again. Physical therapy is good, stretching is good, but there's no substitute for making demands on your muscles.

The result of my mom's self-directed exercise program is that she can put her foot flat on the floor. No procedures needed.

The next roadblock to remove: lack of strength in her feet and flexibility in her legs.
Labels:

Comments

Danny Dave said…
I am somehow concerned by the fact that none of the doctors recommended stretching exercises?
November 29, 2010
Lori Miller said…
Agreed. I don't know my mother's doctors, but what I suspect is this: there's not much money to be made from telling patients to go home and stretch. That, and the procedures I described are the doctors' shtick.
November 30, 2010
Anonymous said…
Well, and MOST people probably won't actually DO the stretching at home... If you don't have someone cracking a whip (or providing loving-but-active-and -present support {G}), it's way too easy to just not do it! Elenor
June 30, 2011
Lori Miller said…
My mother ended up having the surgery (see the first bullet point). She's still in recovery, so we'll have to wait and see what the outcome is.
June 30, 2011
Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Black Friday Deals for Good Health

Here are some great Black Friday deals--all ONLINE--that can benefit your health. I've used most of these products and vendors and recommend them. I'm not an affiliate.  Vitamins iHerb.com is having a 25% off Black Friday and Cyber Monday site-wide sale. Vitacost.com is offering $10 off $50, stackable with a variety of other deals. Tried and True Supplements I use: Doctor's Best magnesium ( peach powder , unflavored powder , and tablets ) Country Life kelp tablets Solgar zinc, 22 mg NOW vitamin D, 5,000 IU NOW astaxanthin, 4 mg Jarrow hyaluronic acid, 120 mg Solaray vitamin C tablets, 485 mg Collagen Powder, Dips, Dressings, Mayo and Sauces Primal Kitchen products--all made without added sugar or Frankenfoods--are on sale. If you remember Mark Sisson from the Mark's Daily Apple blog, Primal Kitchen is his company. PrimalKitchen.com  (25% off this week only) iHerb.com  (25% off) Vitacost.com (20% off) I love their vanilla, peanut butter and chocolate-mint collagen pow...
Post a Comment
Read more

Carrageenan: A Sickening Thickener. Is it a Migraine Menace?

Let me tell you about my ride in an ambulance last night. I woke up at six o'clock from a nap with a mild headache. I ate dinner and took my vitamins, along with a couple of extra magnesium pills. Since magnesium helps my TMJ flare-ups, I thought it might help my headache. Then I went to see my mother. A few hours later, I had a severe headache, sinus pain and nausea. During a brief respite from the pain, I left for home, but less than a mile later, I got out of my car and threw up. A cop, Officer Fisher, pulled up behind me and asked if I was okay. He believed me when he said I hadn't been drinking, but he said I seemed lethargic and he wanted the paramedics to see me. (Later he mentioned that a man he'd recently stopped was having a stroke.) Thinking I had a migraine headache, the paramedics wanted to take me to the hospital. But since I knew that doctors don't know what causes migraine headaches, and I didn't know what effect their medicine would have on m...
15 comments
Read more

1972: Carole King, M*A*S*H and...Food for 2014?

I feel well enough to try Atkins induction again. The palpitations are gone, even without taking potassium. My energy level is back to normal--no more trucking on the treadmill early in the morning  to burn off nervous energy or emergency meat, cheese and mineral water stops after yoga. It's back to lounging around to Chopin and Debussy in the morning and stopping at the wine bar for pleasure. I'm using the original Atkins book: Dr. Atkins' Diet Revolution from 1972. While looking in the book for a way to make gelatin (which is allowed on induction, but Jello(TM) and products like it have questionable ingredients), I felt the earth move under my feet : those recipes from 42 years ago look delicious and they're mostly real food. It makes sense, though: the cooks who wrote the recipes probably didn't have had a palette used to low-fat food full of added sugar or a bag of tricks to make low-fat food edible. Anyone who writes a recipe called "Cottage Cheese and...
21 comments
Read more

In Defense of Fast Food

Another modern trend - healthy food should be expensive, not nutrients-dense and preferably exotic, or you would be eating like plebs who live on a dollar McD menu. --Galina L. I don't try to jump over seven-foot hurdles, I look for one-foot hurdles I can step over. --Warren Buffett, pleb who eats at McDonald's Despite all the talk about wild-caught v. farmed, grass-fed v. CAFO and the vilification of fast food, a lot of us plebs benefit simply from carbohydrate restriction. But even though diabetes and obesity are rampant, and carb restriction alone would help millions of people, the impression is out there that you need to eat in a very specific way, far beyond just watching the carbs. Following a low-carb diet is already a high hurdle for many people. If some people want or need to raise the bar for themselves, that's fine with me, but there's no need to turn low-carb into a hurdle that a lot of people can't jump over. Organic produce and grass-fed or p...
17 comments
Read more

My New Favorite Sweetener

If you're looking for a low-carb sweetener with no aftertaste, no franken-ingredients, and that doesn't upset your stomach, try monk fruit (also known as luo han guo). This is what Quest bars were sweetened with when they first came out. Monk fruit is Dr. Davis approved. You can buy monk fruit in powdered or liquid form; both are super-concentrated. They might seem expensive, but you use the powder by the spoonful (even in baking recipes) and the liquid by the drop. The baking recipes I've made with the powder have turned out well. Available from Amazon . Beware monk fruit sweeteners with erythritol.  The package of powdered monk fruit sweetener I bought says, "Use 1/8 teaspoon to create the same sweet taste as 1 teaspoon of sugar." But it's so sweet that I use 1/10 the amount. To replace a cup of sugar, I would use 5 teaspoons of monk fruit sweetener. Tip: hand-stir this in before using the beaters. It's such a fine powder that it flies up and out of the ...
2 comments
Read more