Recuperation Is Not Fast

A full day without the buddy tape around my big toe and it’s nearest neighbor. It’s been interesting. After six weeks of being taped and 99% of that time in a recovery shoe on top of it, the first sensation was that it felt incredibly odd to have air touching it. In fact, the first time I felt a draft on my foot it and was positively shocking! What’s that??

My first observations was that my foot didn’t fall apart without the tape to hold it together. Whew! And the range of motion in my toe is not what it was. I started to say “not what it should be,” but after a month and a half of being immobile, I suspect this is not far off what one would expect.

A full day later, I can’t tell if I’ve reclaimed one iota of the range of motion in my big toe, but I can tell I probably over did it  a little on day one. I woke up and my foot was stiff and the first impact with the floor brought a slight wave of pain in the ball and arch of my foot. None of the pain is really centered where I broke my toe, which makes me feel more comfortable with the assumption that the real issue is tendons and muscles that have gotten tightened up and weak.

Spent part of the morning with a heating pad to warm up the foot and while it was on moved my toes back and forth as much as possible to try to limber things up. It definitely helped in that regard as when I turned off the pad I felt about where I was yesterday when the tape first came off.

I think the sum of it is, not surprisingly there’s more recuperation ahead. From the little I read online about regaining the full range of motion in my toes, it mainly comes down to using them again. Presuming there’s not a physical reason which doesn’t seem likely, then it’s just time to get my foot used to going through its paces again (pun not intended).

There’s part of me that wants to hop up and push through and get moving again. But I suspect I need to balance it with the reality that six weeks of not moving this toe is not going to be undone in six minutes. So, maybe I have more time to also enjoy sitting and getting back to work uploading my Egypt art to my Fine Art America account, eh?