Hi all,
I’m taking a break for my Surgery Dairies series of posts today, because I have some exciting news!
Alicia over at Sapshionista had done a blog post about me, which you can read here.
I urge you all to go and read her blog about looking good and feeling good, no matter what your age, body shape or abilities.
Thank you to Alicia for giving me the opportuinity to feature on her blog.
Enjoy folks!
Nic
So there’s just under a week left of August which means that my posts reflecting on my surgery six years ago in this month are almost over. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Today I’m going to fast forward to when I had the second operation. If you’ve missed anything so far and want to catch up, feel free to do that by clicking here.
Eventually I managed to build up my walking stamina enough to be able to do it around the house again. The problem was that the Kaye Walker frame I was using at the time was too big to fit around our house, so I was given some smaller ones. One that went in front me but didn’t have wheels so I had to pick it up to walk with, and one that did have them so I could roll. We tried crutches too, but the physio and I decided very quickly that they weren’t the right kind of walking aid for me. I felt like I was going to fall over the second I got hold of them, and apparently it showed because the colour drained from my face.
I was back in my own bedroom too by this point and was no longer sleeping in the dining room on the ground floor. Mum made dad redecorate it for me as a special treat and it was nice to be back in my own space again, if not a little strange. Being able to use the bathroom unaided was also something I will never, ever take for granted again.
One little frame stayed upstairs and we kept the other one downstairs. I was surprise how well I managed with a frame that went in front of me rather than one I pulled behind me. There were a couple of mishaps, including one where I almost lost a front tooth. Thankfully it only came slightly out of place and was fixed when Mum accidently bumped my wheelchair down the kurb a bit too hard in her rush to get me to the dentist. My jaws rattled together and somehow this managed to knock it back into the right position it had always been in. Talk about lucky. I just had to eat soft foods for a week while it healed and it was good as new. Phew!
I was starting to finally feel a little bit better about how things were starting to happen. I could see progress every day, even if it was quite small some of the time, but it was starting to happen. I could see a time when I could walk unaided again, and I’ll tell you more about that in my next post!
So there’s just over a week left of August which means that my posts reflecting on my surgery six years ago in this month are almost over. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Today I’m going to fast forward to when I had the second operation. If you’ve missed anything so far and want to catch up, feel free to do that by clicking here.
Six weeks after I had the muscles in my legs lengthened, I went back to see my surgeon who was happy for the pots to come off my feet, and for me to only have to wear my leg gaiters at night from there on in. This was an amazing feeling! It was kind of nice to be back in my own wheelchair too, I won’t lie.
One of the things that excited me most of all was the fact that I could start to try and go back to wearing jeans again, rather than all the skirts and dresses that I’d bought especially to wear over the previous couple of months. It helped me start to feel like I was getting back to my old self again, even though there was still a really long way to go.
This was the time when all the hard work of getting myself back on my feet and making the most of the surgeries that I’d been fortunate enough to have on the NHS. There were often times when I was angry and frustrated because things didn’t happen at the pace I wanted them to and I felt like I should have been making things happen right away.
I was starting to walk again now, but very slowly. I could only comfortably manage a few steps at a time and I couldn’t even imagine being able to ever do it without holding onto something ever again. If I’m being completely honest, I don’t think that the enormity of what I was going through hit me until a point a couple of weeks after my second surgery. I’d been doing some work with one of the people helping me with my recovery. I think we’d been practicing getting me used to standing still for short bursts of time to build up my stamina. I was holding on to a table for dear life, but I was doing it. I walked part-way around the table I was using (gripping it tightly, of course) and then was allowed to collapse into my wheelchair for a much needed rest. I was feeling especially frustrated because it hurt quite a lot and used up most of my energy, and the fact that this was something I could have done quite easily before I’d had my operations made it feel worse. I decided to point out how I was feeling to the person helping me, and then they said something that really made reality hit home.
This person mentioned something about learning to walk again.
Oh, Maybe that’s kind of what I was doing In a way? After all, a few months before I hadn’t been able to stand, or even crawl and now I was literally having to take things one step at a time. Dang. I hadn’t looked at it that way before. Maybe I was just being too hard on myself. My family and friends had been using similar phrases for weeks and I’d been brushing them off, refusing to believe that anything that had been happening to me over the last couple of months had been a big deal. After that I tried to keep a rational head when I was getting mad and not judge myself too harshly.
So there’s just over a week left of August which means that my posts reflecting on my surgery six years ago in this month are almost over. Thanks for sticking with me so far. Today I’m going to fast forward to when I had the second operation. If you’ve missed anything so far and want to catch up, feel free to do that by clicking here.
The plan had originally been to do both the bone-breaking operation and the muscle-stretching one in the longer summer holidays that I had between finishing my GCSEs and starting Sixth Form, but for various reasons things didn’t happen that way. Surgery Number Two happened during the school year sometime in November.
Having my muscles cut and lengthened was even more tough than I ever thought it would be. When I woke up from this round of going under the surgeon’s knife I was so swollen that my legs practically met each other in the middle, and I was really bruised so much it hurt to sit. Mum told me a looked a little bit like a lump of liver more than once. Cheers, Mother, I love you too.
My feet were in pots and my legs were strapped into something called gaiters because I wasn’t allowed to bend them unless it was to get washed or do my exercises for the first six weeks. I’ve never done them so much in my life, just for an excuse to move my legs. Thankfully this time I was encouraged to stand and do bits of walking (with the gaiters still on). I’m not sure if you’ve ever tried to wonder around without bending your knees, but it’s certainly a strange and interesting experience, but one I got used to pretty quickly. I was given a temporary wheelchair that I could use to keep my legs in the right position, but if wanted to sit in an arm chair in the living room, my parents would have to strap them to the coffee because they’d always fall off otherwise.
My school were great. They were really helpful and supportive but I won’t deny that I found keeping up difficult. I tried my hardest to throw myself into the work as much as possible in the first few weeks of term before I went back into hospital, but was still doing loads of physio, rattling full of pain killers, (some of which made me tired), and still quite sore and achy in general. Concentrating was hard going. I collected as much work off my teachers to do while I was away to keep myself on target for the exams that I would take it January with my operation two months beforehand. I knew there’d be even more physio, even more tablets, and I’d have to ease my way back into school slowly until I could bear to sit in a chair for long enough to last a whole day. I’d reached the point where I could just about do this after Operation One, but now I was back at square one again.
I took my January exams and they really didn’t go how I had hoped, but they did turn out just as I expected. Thankfully lots of hard work later I managed to pass them (and my next round of exams on top of those) in May so everything turned out well in the end. My second year of A-levels went even better and I achieved more than I ever thought I would. I got far better grades than I needed to get into the university that I wanted. Somehow I got through and that’s what mattered.
I know I’ve talked a lot about school today, but I’ll go into more detail about the impact of Operation Two and my recovery in my next post.
A couple of weeks after the surgery I was told that I’d be starting hydrotherapy as part of the recovery process and my heart sank. I’d had group sessions a couple of years before at my local pool and I hated it, although it was there that I finally did learn how to swim aged about 11.
At first I’d disliked it because I couldn’t swim without armbands and all the other kids seemed to be better than me which made me very, very sad. The physios there would make me work hard and then I’d have to go to school smelling of chlorine and answer questions from my classmates about where I’d been. They’d ask me how far I could swim, and I’d have to tell them that I could only manage five metres. I felt lame. I used to go to bed on Thursday nights and hoped that I would be too ill to turn up the next day.
Over the years though my Friday mornings in the pool paid off and I learned to swim not only on my back, but on my front AND under the water; the latter being my favourite way of doing it. Eventually I started to look forward to going, although I still didn’t particularly enjoy it. I liked it because it gave me a chance to meet other kids from other schools and everybody would try and help each other reach our targets when we could. I could see myself improving, but it got to the point where I couldn’t really take time away from school lessons to go anymore when the work became all about passing exams.
When I found out I’d be trying it again I felt really nervous because I was worried that I would have deteriorated, but at least these sessions would be one-on-one in a proper hydro pool rather than my local swimming baths.
Getting in the first time was hard work. I still wasn’t allowed to stand after the operations, so I had to slide from my wheelchair (with the help of my Dad) onto a bed/lift thing that lowered me into the water, and my feet could barely touch the bottom once I was in. I was pleased when I realised that these appointments weren’t really going to be about swimming, but just about doing exercises mostly. The water was so lovely and warm, and it felt so nice just to be floating again while it look my weight, that I really, really looked forward to going. Luckily when I started my A-levels at school after summer was over; there was a gap in my timetable on the days that I was supposed to go so it was still okay. Schooldays felt long and tough at first so it was something nice to look forward to that helped me through my Tuesday morning.
A couple of weeks into the appointments I was allowed to try and take a few steps while I was in the water because it would support me and it wouldn’t be the same as trying to stand on my own or something. It was hard but It felt wonderful. Never again will I dread hydrotherapy.
viewfromawalkingframe 