Every winter, I dread the arrival of the stuff they call snow. Some years we don’t get any and sometimes we do.
I find it really hard to walk around outside when it hits. During these times I often don’t leave the house without someone with me for the fear that I will fall or get myself stuck somewhere.When I do go out, I take someone with me, and I use my wheelchair instead of my walking frame.
Earlier I noticed that things suddenly got very dark outside. At first I think it was raining really hard and then I noticed there was white stuff falling from the sky. At first I thought that it might have been hailstones because they were drumming quite hard against the window, it still might have been to start with, I’m not too sure. I wandered over to the window to take a look and noticed that the stuff falling from the sky seemed to look softer than before. I stood watching it come down for a few moments and the roofs of nearby houses started to get dusted in a fine white powder, as did the road and pavement.
It was snow.
Then, as quickly as it started, it stopped again. I think It’s all gone from the pavement and the road now, but there’s still a little bit on the houses.
I’m hoping that that will be the end of our snow for this year, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if we got some more.
Believe it or not, I’ve actually managed to expand my huge sock collection that I’ve blogged about so often. I have ones of all different kinds for when my feet get cold, for sleeping in, and for when I’m wearing splints. Turns out I didn’t have as many of type number three as I thought, though…
Now that I’m starting to wear splints again, I found that I didn’t have any long socks that come up to, or over my knees. I didn’t realise this until I actually went looking for them in my sock drawer and my excess sock bag and found that I only had two pairs left! I was quite surprised by this because when I used to have splints before, a lot of the socks I owned were long because I wore my splints of often. I don’t really like the feeling of the splint against my bare skin, and I sometimes find that it gets on my nerves if I’ve been walking round in them all day. Having longer socks that came up my lower leg to around my knee made them more comfortable for me, and if the socks came over my knees I would just roll that part back down over the top of the splint, if that makes sense. I find that tights are good too.
Over time I guess the ones I used to have all got worn out and had to be thrown away, so I decided that I should probably buy some more.
Although now my sock collection is taking up a drawer, a bag, and has now started to progress into taking up room in a storage box too! Not that that will ever stop me buying any more. I like them all too much for that! And, I’ll still need all my shorter ones for days when I’m not wearing splints and my thicker ones for when it gets cold, right?
At least I should be able to wear these new ones as matching pairs for a while at least. That said, I did buy them in a couple of different styles and patterns so they will probably end up being worn as odd at some point…
When I got my new night/resting splints last week, I was surprised at just how similar they look to the ones that I wear during the day, well, in my opinion at least.
I didn’t know what to expect from these ones. I’ve had a type of night splints before but I was told that they would be different to those, so it was a bit like watching somebody unwrapping a present when they got taken out of the bag at my appointment.
They do look slightly different, though. As you can see from these pictures,
My day splints
the resting/night ones are white, while I chose to have black ones during the day. The night time ones also have more padding all along the inside, but you can’t tell that from the pictures , I don’t think, because it’s the same colour as the splint itself. I think they are a slightly different shape around the foot. When I tried them on at the appointment I was surprised at how comfy they seemed.
For a while, I spent some time just wearing them in sitting so that I could get used to how they felt before I decided to try them overnight, which I did last night.
I still can’t quite get them on myself, so my mum helped me out before I went to sleep. It took me a little bit of time to get comfortable, but once I did, I don’t think they disturbed my shut eye. I think that wearing these splints in bed might take a bit of getting used to, but hopefully it won’t take too long.
I managed to keep them on for a few hours before I needed to get up in the middle of the night. At this point I had to take them off again because they don’t have any grips on the bottom for walking in. I can take them off by myself, but I haven’t found a way to be able to get them on yet so I’ll have to experiment to try find one. My day splints don’t have grips on either, but I wear these with shoes because they are for during the day when I’m moving around. The night splints are to wear at bedtime, or for periods when I’m going to be sat resting rather than moving.
Hopefully, I’ll manage to put these on by myself soon, but until then I didn’t fancy waking anyone else up to help me with them again because I think it was about 2am at this point, and I don’t think anyone would’ve been best pleased with me. In the end, I decided to keep them off for the rest of the night because my feet were starting to feel like they getting to the point where they’d had enough for one day anyway. When I did remove them, I could tell that’d I’d had been wearing them though, in a good way.
I guess I’ll just have to get into the habit of taking a glass of water to bed with me until I can manage to put them on for myself.
I’m going to try and spent a couple of hours sat in them today while I’m at the computer or something to make up for the time that I didn’t have them on.
I noticed that I was getting a hole in the pair of boots that I wear when I’m not leaving the house in my splints for whatever reason. I always seem to wear the toes on the away because of the way that my feet scrape along the ground when I walk. It doesn’t always take long for this to happen either. But I have to have some different to wear when I’m not using my splints because I need to get a bigger size when my splints are involved so that there’s room for them to go inside.
We’ve had quite a lot of rain here recently and I don’t really like getting wet feet, (who does?), so I knew that, as much as I didn’t want to do it, it was time to hit the shops and look for something new. I decided to do it while I was out with my mum, so that she could help me with any that I decided to try on. I pictured us going round loads of shops and it taking me quite a while to find anything suitable for me, or that I would feel comfortable in.
Oh, how wrong I was.
This time, we were really lucky.
“What about something like this?” Mum asked, holding up a pair of brown boots. They were lined inside too so they would help keep my feet warm. I also quite liked them, but I’m always prepared to buy whatever I can get that seems like it will be okay, even if they aren’t always the things that I would choose based on appearance alone.
I tried them on, but I was also trying really hard not to get my hopes up, just in case.
But…
They actually seemed really comfy, and I felt pretty okay walking in them. It really wasn’t a hard choice. I decided to get them. They were only the first ones I’d looked at but I knew that I didn’t need to look any further. I had found my new boots.
Getting the right ones straight away is something that hardly ever happens on my shoe shopping trips. Sometimes, I come away empty-handed the first time and have to try again on another day. Not that time though, no sir-ee! Needless to say, I was pretty happy about that.
I know that they won’t get worn too often soon once I bed my new splints properly, but I like to have something around that I can turn to if I need to.
I think it’s fair to say that I’ve already had quite a productive morning.
I’ve been back at the hospital today for a few things. First up, I popped to the orthotics department, (the one that I go to about my splints), to have a few adjustments made to the one I wear on my left leg. I got given this pair a few weeks ago, and the right one feels really comfy, but the other still felt a bit too tight for me. I went back and had it blown out a bit shortly after I got them, and it did make a difference, but I felt that it could do with having it done a little bit more for it to feel as comfortable as possible.
This is no one’s fault it just happens sometimes.
Now that it’s been adjusted again I could tell straight away that it feels loads better and I’ve managed to wear it for a few hours. Now I just have to bed it in slowly for a few days, like you would with a pair of new shoes, and then see how it feels after that.
While I was there I was also told that my night splints were ready for me too. These are ones that I’ll wear at night, or at times when I’m going to be resting for a while, like when I’m reading or when I’m watching TV. I’ll take photos of these next week when I’ve had chance to use them properly and get used to them a bit.
I tried this pair on at the appointment and I didn’t want to take them back off again. They felt really soft and comfy. I don’t know if I’ll feel the same after I’ve had them on for a length of time, but we’ll see.
After I’d finished my appointment at the orthotics department, I went for an appointment with my physio. We did some stretching and then we worked on standing straight and she looked at how I walked in the new splints.
She’s given me some pointers of things to work on and watch out for, and then I’ll go back in about a month so she can see how I’ve been getting on. At first, I think it’ll be hard to get into the habits of the things that she wants me to pay attention to when I walk, especially if there aren’t any mirrors nearby for me to look in while I’m trying to do it. Hopefully though, I’ll be able to make some kind of progress, however small (or big) that may be.
Oh, I also picked up some equipment that an occupational therapist had left for me to try out. It’s a rocker knife that is curved so that you can’t cut up your food using a rocking motion instead of pushing and pulling the knife back and forth. I think I’ve mentioned a few times that I find cutting things up difficult, so I’m really looking forward to giving this a go. It’s being loaned to me for a couple of weeks or so to give me a chance to experiment and then if I like them, I’ll get one of my own.
It looks like I could be in for an interesting weekend.
viewfromawalkingframe 