People who’ve been following this blog a while might know that I got given some new night splints a bit ago. These are to wear when I’m in bed or just resting in the house. I like them. I personally find them really comfortable and can feel the stretch when I’ve had them on.
However, I could never manage to wear them for an entire night because I haven’t yet managed to be able to get them on for myself, and they didn’t have walking grips on the bottom. This meant that I had to take them off if I needed to get up in the middle of the night, and kept them off because I didn’t want to wake my mother up to get her to put back on again.
However, at my last appointment with my orthotist, he offered to put some grips on the bottom for me if I brought them back in to make this easier.
I’m really excited about this because I’m hoping that I’ll be able to move around in them easily so I’ll be able to wear them for longer.
It will be a little while before I get them back, but I’m already looking forward to it.
I’ll let you all know how it goes as soon as I can.
I had a lovely surprise when I went to see the physio this week and she said that she was pretty pleased with the way that my ankles and legs were feeling in terms of muscle tightness. I was worried that they might have stiffened up a bit since the last time I saw her but she seemed pretty happy with them when she did my stretches so I was impressed. I decided to take that as a good sign. I guess my day splints and my night splints must be doing some good.
The day splint I wear on my left foot is still feeling a little tighter than I want it to and is rubbing a bit, although it hasn’t blistered me or anything so that’s good. It just makes my foot a little red in places so I’m going to go back and see my orthotist so he can tweak it a little more for me. I’ve been back about this a couple of times now, and I can tell that we’re almost there with it but I know that it’s important that we keep going until it feels as comfy as the one I wear on my right foot does.
It’s no one’s fault that I have to keep going back, it just happens sometimes.
I’m willing to continue having adjustments made a little bit at a time until we get there.
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 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.
My serial casting pots got taken off yesterday which I was very happy about, and my new day time splints (also called AFOs) have also arrived.
I had the pots taken off yesterday morning and then went straight round to the department that deals with the splints to get them fitted.
It looks like the serial casting has helped to make my ankles less tight, which is what we wanted. I’m not entirely sure how much difference it has made, but I have an appointment with the physio in a couple of weeks so she’ll be able to give me a better idea.
When I first came out of the casts my ankles ached for quite a while afterwards but my mum and I did a bit of stretching and that has passed now, which is really quite nice.
The thing that took me by surprise the most was how strange I found it when I first put my new splints on yesterday. I had them for most of my childhood but stopped wearing them about a year ago when it was decided that we would try to see how well callipers worked for me.
Although I’m sure they work well for a lot of people, this wasn’t the case for me because I had a lot of problems with blistering. This is why we made the choice to give splints another go after we had relieved some of the tightness in my ankles by doing the serial casting.
I kind of thought that because I’d worn splints for so long before that it wouldn’t really feel odd to me, but it did. Now I just have to go through the process of bedding them in slowly a couple of hours at time until I get used to it again, which could take a while.
As I’m only on day two of the process, I’ll update you all about it a bit later on when I’ve got a bit more to say about it.
They fit inside a pair shoes that you can buy in the shops too although I have to buy them a size bigger than I would normally take without them and make sure that I get a pair that is wide enough to accommodate them.
I guess it’s time that I dug out my old collection of over-the-knee socks that I used to wear with my old ones. I find that helps to make them more comfy because it stops them sticking to the back of my legs.
viewfromawalkingframe 