I’m the switchboard operator for our local welfare office, and I’m meeting with the HR director of the office next week to discuss coming back.
I’m adjusting pretty well, I think. I really didn’t have any long period of self-pity or despair. A couple of days, maybe, but really…you have two options when something like this happens. You can just give up and spend the rest of your life in bed, or you can work your butt off to bring things back to some semblance of normal. I always thought, before this happened, that I’d be the former, but I surprised myself by ending up being the latter.
It’s true what they say…you can pretty much get used to anything eventually. Donning and doffing the thing is a little bit of a pain in the ass, but the alternative (which, for me in this house, is confining myself to bed, basically) is much worse. And when I get the permanent prosthesis (this is the “trainer”, so to speak), the suspension system is going to be different, more secure and less of a pain to maintain, so I have that going for me.
The interesting thing is negotiating terrain that I never even had to think about before…you have to really have active balance awareness and control on slopes and uneven ground (like grass in a park or something) because the foot on the prosthesis doesn’t have an ankle joint…whichever way the ground tilts isn’t going to be compensated by your ankle hinging, which means the whole lower leg will be at the angle to gravity that the slope is. Which means leaning back a bit on the downslope and working a little harder to negotiate an upslope. On a flat floor in a house it’s not a problem, but in, say, a convenience store parking lot that slopes to the street, it is.