I went to the prosthetics shop for my appointment last Wednesday and found this accidental history lesson leaning against the wall. The prosthesis on the right is a below-knee peg leg from the 19th century or earlier. The user would have bent his knee and rested it on the platform. The lower strap would have gone around the user’s lower thigh and knee, and the upper strap was a belt around the waist to stabilize the leg to the user’s body. The prosthesis in the middle is a post-World War Two model for an above-knee amputee. The socket is aluminum with a fiber liner inside and an articulated, wood foot. The prosthesis on the left is a contemporary below-knee suction socket with a cosmetic covering.
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In an earlier post, I discussed the problem of my leg clicking. Although I’ve more or less solved the problem of my socket being a bit tight, I haven’t made any headway with the clicking — which is now beginning to drive me a little batty.
We’re used to receiving sensory feedback when we walk, but it’s mostly physical and phenomenological. We feel our legs swing through the air, our feet rollover, our arms swing at our sides, our trunks gently sway side to side and roll up and down. We feel ourselves walk. But I don’t usually hear myself walk, and I find it really distracting.
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In an earlier post, I described two problems. One was that my stump shrinks during the day and swells back up at night, so the leg is a bit tight in the morning. It seems that the best way to deal with this is to wear a stump shrinker at night. A stump shrinker is essentially a tube of elastic fabric. You pull it halfway onto your stump, twist it, and double it back to pull the other half onto your stump.
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I went to the prosthetics shop for my appointment last Wednesday and found this accidental history lesson leaning against the wall. The prosthesis on the right is a below-knee peg leg from the 19th century or earlier. The user would have bent his knee and rested it on the platform. The lower strap would have gone around the user’s lower thigh and knee, and the upper strap was a belt around the waist to stabilize the leg to the user’s body. The prosthesis in the middle is a post-World War Two model for an above-knee amputee. The socket is aluminum with a fiber liner inside and an articulated, wood foot. The prosthesis on the left is a contemporary below-knee suction socket with a cosmetic covering.