48 Hours Later

You'll have to excuse the frequent postings. As I mentioned in the first entry, the main purpose of this blog, at least for the short-term, is to document my recovery from my Hallux Rigidus surgery. I know it's probably not the most interesting thing to read about for those of you who have no experience with it, but my hope is that this can be used as a resource for other runners as they contemplate moving forward with a similiar procedure. I know I had a hard time finding a lot of information, from a runner's perspective, on recovery from this surgery.

So as of right now, I am 48 hours removed from surgery. Yesterday, around 2PM, I decided to try and move around without the crutches. At first I was extremely tentative and didn't think it was going to work. I didn't have a lot of confidence in the foot holding up to my full weight. However, once I figured out how to do it (lead with the heal and keep the weight off the toes), it became much easier, and within about an hour, I was pretty much done with the crutches. Thank God, because my underarms were getting quite annoyed with those things.

Pain has been manageable and I've pretty much stopped taking the pain medication on any sort of regular schedule. Going forward, I'll just take it on an as needed basis. It feels like I have a foot bruise right now, with an occasional shooting pain through the toe. I have iced it a few times over the past day and that does seem to help if the bruise feeling starts to become annoying. Last night I slept the best I have in a long time, although after 10 hours of no pain medication, the foot was a bit sore when I woke up.

Overall, I think things are going about as good as could be expected. The past 24 hours have been extremely encouraging, and hopefully things will continue to improve. Today's main objective is to survive my son's 3 year old birthday party. I was able to make the chili last night and chicken wings are going on the grill shortly. Hey, I'm not running for the foreseeable future. I can eat chicken wings and chili if I want to.