Hobbling

The bits of my injuries that are most visible are the scrapes and cuts, and those are certainly ugly, painful, and nasty. Particularly when the bandages are off and they're being cleaned out. But they're also already recovering, and they're very shallow. (The knee's scraping covers a lot of area, but it's still shallow.)

But what's really impairing me is the deeper muscle bruising in the knee. Even there, what looks bad isn't the bad part. My walk is a shuffling hobble that's alarmingly slow, even with the cane (it's hard to adjust my cane stride to the opposite timing to when it was being used to ease the burden on my right knee). And I can't walk too long either before I need a rest.

But the biggest problem by far is sitting down, standing up, getting into bed, and getting out of bed. The deep bruising in my left knee means I can be moving just fine on that leg until the force on it happens to be just a little transverse, and then wham, it's a jolt of pain through me, the kind of pain Tylenol (or even hydrocodone) can't touch. It's hard to sleep with the chance that a small movement of my leg will activate that jolt of pain; the number of positions that I can get into, that I can stay in, and that aren't a tiny movement away from one of those jolts, is very very limited.

For a bruising and scraping they don't do immobolization, but sometimes I wonder if it might not be a good idea. If I could completely keep my knee from moving, that would make sleeping a lot easier. It wouldn't make getting up and sitting down easier; right now I can get up and down in ways that depend on a little more flexibility at the cost of jolts of pain, and with a cast, I would have a harder time getting up and down, but there'd be no jolts of pain. (And people would expect me to not be able to do it without aids of some sort.)

(Tomorrow I need a more interesting blog topic. Though "slice of my day" posts do get far more comments than essays and philosophy and science and politics, so maybe not! On the other hand, finding appropriate pictures for posts like this is tricky.)