I've mentioned that I thought that my
splint was not put on very well and that because of this, my pain
level has been higher for the past couple of weeks. I feel like it's too
tight in certain places and I think that when the local hospital
re-splinted it (after my pseudo fall), they placed my polar cube
attachment too high. With it being too high, the benefit of the cold
therapy wasn't really addressing the places on my foot that it needed
to.
 |
| The pic on the left is the original splint that I came hope from the hospital in. The pic on the right is after my local hospital re-splinted it. |
So Sunday I decided to undo my ace
bandages and wiggle the polar cube attachment down my foot as much as
I could. I then ace bandaged it back to stay in place. It's still
highly uncomfortable, but I think my pain level has been a teeny bit
better now that the polar cube attachment is lower. You should have
seen the look on my husband's face when he walked in in the middle of
the whole process. He thought I had lost my mind! In all fairness, I
probably did. But when you are in pain, you are willing to do crazy
things.
My appetite the past few days has been
kinda “meh". Probably because of the pain meds, but also
because I've been struggling a bit with depression as well.
Depression is something that I struggle with on and off, but it's
always worse when I'm in pain. So I've been purposely trying to keep
my blinds open to let in more sunlight (this helps a bit) and I
decided this morning that I wanted to try to decrease my pain
medicine intake in case this was a contributing factor. Being on so
many drugs really messes with your body, and I want to get off as
many as I can, as quickly as I can. But this is a slow process, and
because I have been struggling to keep my pain under control, I can't just
get all gung-ho and cut things out.
For the past 5-6 days I've been taking
2 Vicodin pills every 4 hours. Today I decided that I'd try to
change that to 1.5 pills every 4 hours. It's been a bit more
painful, probably back to the pain level of a few days ago, but I've tolerated the half a pill difference. It
will be interesting to see how tonight goes as the nighttime always
seems harder. I'll try this for a few days and see if I can even
stretch the time to every 5-6 hours. This process may take a while, but
I'm hoping that once I get this splint off and the stitches out tomorrow,
that the pain will be better. Especially since I've been blaming
this damned splint for much of my pain.
When my hubs got home from work today I
told him about the medicine change. He was happy for me, but
reminded me that tomorrow will be a long day. Since we'll be
traveling to DC tomorrow, I'll have to remember to medicate before we
leave and to take my medication with me for the car ride back. It's
at least an hour drive to the hospital and then the appointment can
take a while. For ankle #1 back in June, we had a morning
appointment, just like this one, and was at the doctors for 2-3
hours. My husband ended up taking the whole day off of work instead
of just going in for the afternoon because we were gone for so long.
Wish me luck tomorrow! Hopefully all
will be okay and my pain levels will finally subside...just in time
for my physical therapist to kill it :)
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