My New Leg

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.

They’re often used on new amputees to help reduce the edema after surgery, which is why I’m not very fond of them. After my motorcycle accident, I was in the hospital for 15 days, much of it in a daze of painkillers. My left foot had been crushed between a car bumper and my bike, and my thigh had suffered a compound fracture, so my leg was hugely swollen with edema from the trauma. I don’t remember much of it, which is probably a good thing. But I do have an embodied memory of two prosthetists coming to my hospital room (one of them being Bill, who now works in Wayne’s shop) near the end of my stay and pulling a stump sock onto my leg — and that it was dreadfully painful.

I still find them uncomfortable and have always resisted wearing one at night, but it’s clearly the best way to keep the size of my stump from fluctuating so much and make it easier to wear my new leg — at least until my stump permanently shrinks down a bit to fit it.

So I need to call the shop and ask for a stump shrinker. But in the meantime, I wanted to jury-rig an immediate solution so I wouldn’t have to feel my stump go numb and get nasty phantom pains each morning, so I ran to the drugstore and picked up a compression stocking.

I tied a knot at the heel of the stocking, creating an elastic tube closed at one end. I’ve been using it the past few nights and found it works pretty well as a Do It Yourself stump shrinker. I wouldn’t use it forever, but it works in a pinch. My stump isn’t swollen up in the morning, and getting into the prosthesis is much easier. As the title says, this is much better.

I’ve noticed the hamstring muscles on the back of my left leg still get tight if I walk around the house much, but I suspect it means I need to dorsiflex the foot more. My toes are angled slightly too far down which means I walk on my heels when I’m barefoot at home, which hyperextends my knee and pulls on the muscles in the back of my thigh. I’ll have to remember to ask the prosthetist to dorsiflex my foot a little when I go in to pick up the stump shrinker.