They say it comes in three’s…

They, whoever 'they' are, were not wrong…

Oh my, so much has happened in the last couple of weeks since my last blog. I don’t know where to start.

I’ll start with the easiest to explain… my good ol papaya.

Recovery is going ok right now as I type this. It hasn’t been great though as I got struck down with an infection in week two which has set me back a couple of weeks.

It’s funny, well, no, it’s not really funny, nothing about this has been funny, but I was doing really well before the infection hit. I was feeling really good, pain was pretty much non-existent and I was happy with how it was going.

I was feeling so good, I was starting to do things that I didn’t think was pushing it, but Matt and my mum will tell you a different story I'm sure. One day my mum uttered the words (I’m not saying she’s a voodoo witch or anything, but…) ‘you need a dose of pain to remind you that you’ve had major surgery and to slow you down a bit’. Then voila, major pain… Thanks Mum.

The only way I can describe how I felt on the Tuesday morning when the infection took hold is, think of the worst hangover you’ve ever had, you know, that one with the headache where just slightly lifting your head off the pillow hurts, along with feeling sick, going hot and cold and shivery? Times that feeling by about 50 then add pelvic/abdominal pain and we might just about be there. It was horrid. The worst bit though was that I wanted/needed to be sick, but wasn’t allowed to because of the stitches. Stopping sneezing was bad enough, but fighting against my body when it wanted to throw up was just grim.

I ended up back at the hospital and was given a dose of strong antibiotics which took about six days to make me start feeling better. In those six days I did absolutely nothing. I hid from the world and discovered Homeland and Orange is the New Black (how good are they!?)

So where am I up to today? I am feeling loads better and finally managed my first walk this morning (2 Nov) to take Isabelle to school. Progress, at last. This should have probably happened two weeks ago and now I should be at running a marathon stage, but no, a walk will have to do me. And despite me saying to Matt I would be able to walk to school AND back, he insisted he picked me up at the school and bring me back home. I huffed about it, but it was the right thing to do as by the time I got to school I had that horrible dragging feeling in the papaya (anybody who has given birth will now be saying, oh yes, THAT feeling). A bit like the world is going fall out of your under carriage.

So that’s the papaya ticked off. 

Now bear with me a bit here so I can update you on the airboot that I am currently wearing. 

Yes, you think that’s for my knee don’t you? It’s not.

Trying to make it look cool! Trying being the operative word

The Foot

Let me take you back to August 2015 where I started a secondment from Mace working at The Co-operative in Manchester. I was based at The Co-op’s lovely new head office, One Angel Square. For those that know the office, it is located right by Victoria Train station in Manchester.

Typically, the train services to Victoria from Newton le Willows didn’t really work with my hours, so I opted to get the train to Manchester Piccadilly, across the other side of Manchester, which wasn’t a problem, because I had my new fitbit, so the 20 minute walk across Manchester would be fine (and count towards my daily step goal, bonus). Also, I love walking, especially through Manchester. 

I even sacrificed fashion to wear my trainers with my suits so I didn’t aggravate my knee (we will get to that particular body part in a minute).

After about a week of walking across Manchester, I started to notice a pain in the ball of my foot just below my big toe. The best way to describe it was that I was walking with a marble in my shoe. In true Kirsty way, I thought ‘oh, it will be nothing and it’ll go away soon’. It didn’t, so I changed my trainers because I thought maybe that was the problem. No, still there.  

By now I was walking differently. I was walking on the right side of my foot to ease the pain with the big toe. The pain in my toe was so bad now that even my duvet cover resting on my toe was hurting me.

It is worth noting at this point that the toe problem was on the same leg as the knee problem.

Are you keeping up…..? 

In the meantime, I was having physio on my knee, which had started to improve loads, in fact, the knee pain was suddenly non-existent. So I mentioned my toe to my physio Vicky and the fact that my knee had stopped hurting and questioned if it was because I was walking different.

She had a look and moved it around and I swear, I nearly kicked her in the face it hurt that much. She couldn’t believe I had been walking around on it and decided to work on it as she thought that it may have just been inflamed from walking more than I normally do. She also queried if it may be a stress fracture. We decided to leave it a week and see how it was after treatment. 

I’ll tell you what happened after the treatment, it felt good and pain free, for four whole hours. This was the day I mentioned earlier in my blog when I said I had one pain free day since January. I was fab, no knee pain, no toe pain, woohoooo. 

It was short-lived.

The pain from the toe now was constant and pretty relentless and Vicky said we needed to assume it was a stress fracture because it wasn’t responding to treatment and when I started my pulse shock therapy on my knee with my consultant, I should mention it to him. I didn’t have time to get an x-ray but Vicky said it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway because they don’t put a cast on broken toes, they leave it to heal on its own……

The knee

For those that have known me since school, you will remember back then I was a pretty good middle/long distance runner and I was tipped for big things. That was until my knees decided to blow up when I was about 15 and a couple of knee operations later I was told I couldn’t run again and that was the end of any athletics career I may have dreamed of.

So my knees have never been my friend and in January this year I started feeling pain and yet again, brushed it off and thought it will be nothing and it will get better. I must think I’m some sort of self-healing machine hey!?

Anyway, after a session with what I think was a pretty poor physiotherapist locally, I decided to make use of my BUPA cover through work and go and see a specialised consultant after my doctor referred me. 

I was signed up for Tough Mudder and I needed to start training and the knee was so painful I couldn’t do any sort of running and doing day to day things like kneeling on the floor to change Adam’s nappy and walking up stairs was really painful. It was now a constant pain.

The clinical diagnosis is:

• Patellofermoral pain
• Proximal patellar tendinopathy  

Physio started and after a few sessions and limited improvement, the consultant decided to scan my knee. He then saw the true extent of damage to the tendon (he showed me on the screen and all I saw was a massive hole, which he told me wasn’t good, so I’ll take his word for it) and suggested pulse shock therapy to promote faster recovery. He also told me that Tough Mudder was out of the question.

For those that aren’t aware of Pulse Shock Therapy it’s a set of three, approximately 5 minute sessions, where the consultant basically holds this horrible machine against my knee bone and it hammers away like a woodpecker. This then somehow promotes blood flow to the area which then helps the tendon heal. 

I don’t do bones *cringe* so this was procedure was horrid, even if it is only for five minutes.

Short term pain, long term gain n all that…

When you have pulse shock therapy you aren’t able to exercise in between sessions so you have the best chance of healing. So to limit rest time (who says that!? I am actually a freak of nature aren’t I) I decided to have the pulse shock therapy straight after the papaya surgery as I would be forced to rest anyway so in theory killing two birds with one stone…. Nobody told me there would be a third bird.

  

Knee and toe (I'm sure there is a song in here somewhere...)

Now we have the background to the right leg from hell, I can get you up to date.

When I went to see the consultant for the first pulse shock session, I told him about the toe and he took a look and could see how painful it was. He then told me I needed to get an airboot so the toe was completely rested and he would take a look at it the week after at my second pulse shock session and if it hadn’t improved, I would have an MRI scan.

My face when he told me about the airboot was a picture. I was one week post-op and despite not really being able to move anywhere anyway, he was now making me wear an airboot…. FFS.

The following day was ‘Infection Tuesday’ – insert infection and hospital trip here. Imagine my face now. This was not a good week.

The following week, no toe improvement so the consultant referred me for an MRI scan, which was booked for the following week, straight after my third and final pulse shock session. This was yesterday (1 Nov).

MRI scan complete (the MRI machine isn’t a fun experience is it!?), quick look at the picture by the consultant. ‘Yeah, your toe is damaged in two places (of course it is). You need to see me on Tuesday next week when the radiographer has looked at the scan properly’.

If I was a dog, I swear they would have put me down by now.

But wait……. It doesn’t stop there…… Not content with having a bust big toe, a bust knee and a recovering papaya…. I wake up at 5am last week and decided to nip to the loo. You have to step down two steps to our bathroom. I take the first step and the ankle of my good(!) leg, decides to give way! I quickly whipped my bad foot around to try and stop me falling and WHACK, hit my two toes on the bottom of the baby gate, you know the METAL baby gate. How I didn’t wake the whole house up I will never know but you can now have the vision of me jumping around in the bathroom with a first in my mouth trying not to scream. Just fabulous.

Here is the image of baby gate toe about an hour after it happened.

You couldn’t make this shit up hey.

This is my real life and not fiction, I swear.

And honestly, this is just the tip of the iceberg for the last couple of weeks with other things going on in my life at the minute. But that’s a story for another day.

But hey, you know what, I'm still laughing... just about. If I didn’t laugh about it I’d cry and luckily, I like laughing (a bit like that girl in big brother years ago who liked blinking).

I’ll keep you posted about toe-gate.

Thanks for sticking with this ridiculous airboot ridden story to the end! 

Big hugs xx