My New Leg

After griping about the test socket being too tight, I’ve had a chance to focus on what the feet feel like. Here are some brief thoughts…

While I like the smooth rollover of the Trias, I like it more around the house than outside. First, the keel is a bit short, so the foot feels shorter than what I am accustomed to with the Renegade. Inside, this doesn’t much matter since we don’t wear shoes in my house and I tend to take shorter steps on the slippery hardwood floors. But outside, where I take longer strides, it feels like I’m falling off the Trias.

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Well, now I’ve had a chance to try trotting around on the test socket and the feet, mostly just putting it on in the afternoon and wearing it around the house or while walking around the neighborhood.

Not much to say yet, except I’ve run into the first problem: ouch, the socket is too tight. Way too tight. The problem is that I had asked Wayne to make the socket more tightly fitting than on my current prosthesis, which is getting pretty loose. And he did…

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Sadly enough, I haven’t had much of a chance to try out the test socket yet. I’ve been busy and it takes so much mental energy and focus to think about what a leg feels like, that it’s fallen by the wayside during the past week. It’s difficult to just wear it un-selfconsciously; I feel compelled to concentrate on how the foot feels, how my gait appears, and so on, which turns into a full-time endeavor.

But today I gave a presentation at my older daughter’s preschool on my new leg, which was a lot of fun. Occasionally, a parent comes into the school to talk about something of interest just before “circle time”. It gives the kid a chance to stand at the front of the preschool class with their mom or dad (usually, a mom, I suspect) and help present something neat to their friends.

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Now it was time to go back to the shop, try the test socket and find out what feet Wayne ordered for me to try out. In an earlier posting, I included an email I sent to Wayne listing the feet I would like to try: the Vari-Flex from Ossur (previously Flex-Foot), the Endolite Elite, and the Ohio Willow Wood Pathfinder.

Even after all these years, I still find it a bit strange to think of feet as having brand names and models. It’s simultaneously intriguing and alienating to think of a part of one’s body as a consumer product…

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Once again, Wayne was kind enough to take photos of the process of making the test socket in between my appointments, to which I’ve added a brief description. I should point that this is an ususual step in the process of getting a prosthesis. Many prosthetists simply make a check socket, work with their patients to make their adjustments with that (as I described in my last post) and then build the final prosthesis. In this case, Wayne is really going the extra mile so I can use a test socket to try out a variety of feet before I select one for a final prosthesis.

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