New liners July 27 by Steve
Wayne sent my new liners so I wouldn’t have to come pick them up, and they arrived in the mail today. Here’s what one looks like out of the box. While sockets are custom fit and fabricated, most other prosthetics components are manufactured products like any other.
I was happy to see these arrive. My older liners, after a few years of encasing my stump inside a carbon fiber shell for 16 or more hours a day, are stretched a bit loose and a little smelly. Wayne told me some of his patients spray a 5% solution of Listerine in their silicone liners to keep them from absorbing perspiration odors, so I’ll have to try that with these new ones.
Liners come out of the box without the pins that lock them into the socket, so I had to remove the pins from my old liners and put them on the new. The pins have small 4mm hex indentations in the end, so all you need is an Allen wrench to remove and tighten them. Here’s how…
Having used an Allen wrench to remove the pin from my old liner, I screwed it into the threaded hole in the end of the new liner.
Then I used an Allen wrench to tighten the pin in place. If it comes loose, it can cause clicking and rattling when you walk.
Finally, it helps to cut a new edge on the top end of the liner. For some reason, new liners are hard on skin and the edges are particularly painful. Maybe I just react badly to medical-grade silicone, but the edges of new liners always seem to “grab” onto my skin toward the top of my thigh, causing redness and welts. Ouch!
Using another tip from Wayne, I use a pair of scissors to cut a wavy edge on the top of my liner so it won’t adhere so tightly to my skin, and…
…this is the result. A pain-free, skin-friendly silicone liner!
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Mary Robinette Kowal Aug 6
If the Listerine doesn’t work, you can also try spritzing it with vodka. I speak as a puppet builder, not as a prosthetics user. The vodka trick is an old one for dealing killing odors on tour. I’ve used it with teflon, silicon and latex (plus silk and other stuff).
Steve Aug 7
Mary, thanks for the tip. I never would have thought of vodka, but am now happy I haven’t thrown away that bottle in the back of my freezer. I can’t stand drinking the stuff, but am happy it has another use…