Recovery Note:
Dusting
27 February 2019
After yesterday’s exciting visit to the podiatrist, I decided that I could dust the bedroom (for the first time since 22 December), so long as I did it in fifteen-minute segments, with fifteen-minute breaks. This decision turned out to be sound, or at least not unsound. My right foot did not swell up or change in any way. There is still a small bit of swelling, but the podiatrist pronounced the foot’s condition to be “great,” “looking really good.” He didn’t say anything about staying off my feet, and neither did I.
The excitement was provided by my left foot, which so far has served as a control for what a normal foot, attached to me, ought to look like. Only it was not normal. Owing to the extremely dry skin on the soles of my feet (I think), my big toe was adorned by a blood blister, which the doctor pierced to volcanic effect. Well, there was a lot of blood in the blister. The doctor did not breach a nearby artery. He told me about it, though. When he instructed me to remove the compression bandage, which his aide had wrapped around this new wound, with its solitary stitch, at bedtime, and to replace it with a Band-Aid, he added, “Now, this is not going to happen, but if when you remove the bandage there are jets of pulsating blood, put your finger over your toe and go to the Emergency Room.”
I can laugh now, but I was not fun to be around when Kathleen got home last night, especially since it was she who would be removing the bandage and applying the Band-Aid.
Which she did without incident. As the doctor “assured” me, nothing happened. There was no pulsating blood and no need for a trip to the Emergency Room. When I see the podiatrist in another two weeks, he’ll remove what’s left of the stitch.
About an hour after the tidying was done, I began to feel a bit off. It wasn’t my foot, which I’d have been ready for, but the other end of me, my shoulders. I have not done much with my shoulders in the past two months, and removing all the books from the chin-level dressers, so that I could remove the shag carpet of dust, provoked lively and painful protest. They still ache today, a little.
Meanwhile, I have to moisturize the palms of my hands as well. Same sort of skin, I suppose. Kathleen rubbed a special cream on my feet this morning, and then pulled on the little socks that she calls “peds.” I have to get some more of those, to wear under the new, supposedly wide-enough slip-ons that I ordered when I got home from the hospital. The doctor says that I must wear socks. Wearing gloves would probably be a good idea, but that’s not going to happen.