After enduring an entire month of not driving, three if you
count hospital time, I had finally had enough.
I couldn’t get an answer from anyone as to how long I would be in the
cast. So, on October 1st I
decided enough was enough. I had been
practicing walking without the cast in the house and so with the cast on, I
walked down to my truck. Then just
before getting into the driver’s seat, I took the cast off.
Finally, I was driving.
I was doing with just a sock on my foot.
Contrary to popular belief, it is not unlawful to drive in socks, bare
feet, flip-flops or spike heels. Not
that I wear heels, but if you do it’s not against the law. It’s not recommended and if you get into an
accident and it can be proven that your footwear or lack of it contributed to
the accident, then you can be charged.
Now, being a professional driver since the age of 19 and
driving since I was 17, I have forgotten more about driving than a lot of
people ever knew. I have had a total of
7 advanced driving courses, including high Speed Pursuit driving and VIP
Protection driving. In fact, the last
driving course I took was less than a month before I retired. I didn’t ask to take it, but it was mandated
that everyone in the department had to, and so who was I to turn down a chance
to drive fast in a controlled environment.
But, I digress, suffice to say I was driving again.
It felt good to be behind the wheel and free again. I could run errands, and most importantly
start going to physio. I booked my
appointments and have been going to physio now every day since the beginning of
October. I’m off for a week over
Christmas, but I will continue into the new year until I am back to normal.
The first treatment I got was on my neck. I forgot to mention how I got this injury. I was moved into the rehab ward with about two
weeks left in my hospital stay. The goal,
to get me up walking and being able to function on my own. I was in a 4-person ward with 3 elderly
women. What I didn’t know is that
hospital beds have alarms on them.
One night I was fast asleep at 2:30 AM and for some strange
reason, dreaming I was back at work.
Suddenly an alarm went off and jolted me awake from a deep sleep. I guess training kicked in and I sat bolt
upright and in the process, strained all the muscles in both sides of my
neck. It was very similar to a whiplash
injury. As if I didn’t already have
enough wrong with me.
Several different things would have helped, such as heat,
muscle relaxants and/or massage. Well,
the hospital will not allow heat, because some time in the distant past a
patient got burned. The closest I could
get was a warm blanket. That didn’t
work. They did not have muscle relaxants
available and nurses are not allowed to massage patients.
It’s amazing. Nurses
can give you the most powerful narcotic injections, they can see you naked and
touch you in the most intimate of places, but they are not allowed to give a
massage. It’s considered a healing procedure
and that can only be done by a physio-therapist. Since this happened on a Friday night, and
physio does not work weekends, I was stuck with it until Monday. I was in agony and had a choice between
Tylenol 3 or heavy-duty stuff like Hydromorphone injections. I opted for Tylenol-3 but it wasn’t that
helpful. I also resorted to ice packs.
When physio came in on Monday, she immediately found the
trigger points in both shoulders and with some very painful manipulations was
able to ease the pain, but my neck remained stiff long afterwards, to the point
I had difficulty turning my head.
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| PREP FOR FIRST PHYSIO |
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| THE NEW ME |
As mentioned I got into my own physio when I started driving
again and had spinal decompression on my neck.
I was also taking Robax Platinum, which made a huge difference. I couldn’t get started on my foot, until I
had authorization to take the cast off.
Several phone calls to the surgeon and I got no response. My physio tried faxing him several times and
got no response either. He needed to
know what was done inside my foot before starting to work on it. I had no idea myself, other than it was
drained.
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