On Thursday the cast* came off. Ya wanna see? Never having been involved with a cast or broken bone before, I have found the whole medical process highly educational. If you find it less so, feel free to click away. You won't be missing anything important.
This is the piece of equipment that will cut off the cast.
The saw is electric-powered. The upright part in front of the the left side of the push handle has the circular blade right at the top. The blade is about three inches in diameter and cuts by vibrating instead of spinning.
The nurse practitioner warned me that the vibrations would tickle. And they did.
After she cut through the hard fiberglass shell of the cast lengthwise on each side, she used a tool that was kind of like a reverse pliers to pop it open. She inserted the "jaws" into the slits she had cut with the saw. When she squeezed the handles, the jaws, which in a normal pair of pliers would have gripped, instead spread apart and popped the cast open. She finished the job by using some hefty bandage scissors to cut through the layers of soft cotton padding that were the inner layers of the cast.
I shall not show a picture of my naked leg and foot. They had been encased in one kind of cast or another for exactly seven weeks and were covered in flaky, scaly dead skin. Yech! The first thing I did was scratch it all over. Ahhhh! The NP brought soap and a washcloth and a towel and lotion, and Smokey put his [long-neglected but well-learned] medical nursing skills to work to clean it up. More ahhhhhhhhh! So much better!
X-rays revealed that the bones were healing nicely, as I had suspected.
Here's what I will be wearing for the next six weeks:
It's called a cam boot and it is, in essence, a removable cast. I am still non-weight bearing, but since this is removable it allows me to begin range-of-motion exercises in physical therapy next week. Two weeks of those, then two weeks of strengthening exercises, then two weeks of balance practice; and I will be able to walk again! Yay!
This strap-on cast also allows me finally to take a real bath! Double yay! (echoes of family members and members of the public hurrahing, as well).
Life is good. And getting better.
* The cast didn't smell at all. :-) I am planning to keep it long enough to show it to #1 son when he comes home for Christmas. After that I will coat it with polyurethane, stick it out in the yard come spring, and plant flowers around it. Not.
