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

My Long-Term Experience Eating Safe (and Other) Starches

Years ago, before the Perfect Health Diet came out, I followed a program that involved eating quite a bit "safe starch." It was called Body for Life. It involved eating six small servings of carbohydrate along with six small servings of protein, plus two servings of fibrous vegetables per day. (A serving was the size of your fist or the palm of your hand.) There were six workouts a week (three weightlifting, three cardio) and one free day every week where you ate whatever you wanted and didn't exercise. In all fairness, these two programs are different: BFL allows certain grains, legumes and low-fat dairy and discourages fat. It doesn't call for a wheelbarrow full of vegetation. Nevertheless, my experience eating lots of fruit and lots of starch is relevant to the PHD because the amount and type of digestible carbohydrates are similar, and for the first few years, I didn't eat wheat except on free days. At first on BFL, I felt great. Before, I was continually...
17 comments
Read more

Blog Lineup Change

Bye-bye, Fathead. I've enjoyed the blog, but can't endorse the high-fat, high-carb Perfect Health Diet that somehow makes so much sense to some otherwise bright people. An astrophysicist makes some rookie mistakes on a LC diet, misdiagnoses them, makes up "glucose deficiency," and creates a diet that's been shown in intervention studies to increase small LDL, which can lead to heart disease. A computer programmer believes in the diet and doesn't seem eager to refute it because, perhaps, scientists are freakin' liars and while he's good at spotting logical inconsistencies, lacks some intermediate knowledge of human biology. To Tom's credit, he says it's not the right diet for everyone, but given the truckload of food that has to be prepared and eaten, impracticality of following it while traveling (or even not traveling), and unsuitability for FODMAPs sufferers, diabetics and anyone prone to heart disease (i.e., much of the population), I'm...
24 comments
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