Mangled stump
Two posts in a single day, go me 🙂
Anywho, apart from my musings on February, I also wanted to post about the joys of being an amputee and random, sporadic wounds on my stump. I went to bed on Tuesday night this week without any problems, then woke up on Wednesday morning with an absolute cracker of an infected sore on my stump. This isn’t necessarily anything unusual by itself, it’s just annoying. I think a lot of these instances are caused by infected hair follicles or in-grown hairs, both of which are apparently pretty common amongst amputees. The reason behind them as I understand it is due to the nature of the situation – the stump’s generally wrapped in a non-porous material (in my case, a sheath of silicon that acts as a membrane between my stump and the socket), you get sweaty over the course of the day (exasperated at this point in time by the Australian summer heat), and being a guy and having hairy man legs (is this too much information at this point??), something’s got to give 😛 If I get them in random spots on the leg it’s not too dramatically bad, but when I get them along the areas that support my weight around the socket (typically around the top of the socket and at the very base), it can be extremely painful. Imagine a crazy blind pimple on the ball and heel of your foot, that’s what it feels like.
Thankfully, I was able to drain most of the crap out of it first thing in the morning and went home from work early to take the leg off, keep the wound clean and rest up. I woke up yesterday morning, and my body being the surprising thing it is, healed up most of it, to the point where I didn’t need to bring my walking stick around the office yesterday, which was awesome.
The bummer about it is that I was due to train the night I got knocked with the sore, so I had to bail on the session. Considering how damn good last week’s training was (I was drenched with sweat afterwards, and it was a very rewarding and focused session), I was really looking forward to jumping around in my gi again.
Ah well, I guess there’s always next week!
I know this is still early days with the blog, but hopefully the above might prove useful to other amputees out there who get issues like this with their stumps, either as a general rule, or in exacerbating conditions, like the hot weather.
Well, might finish this one up – I’m planning on adding some blogs in the next couple of weeks to fill in the substantial gap between September 2007 and February 2009, so look out for those. It’s been a good time for training though, and (hopefully!) I’ve been improving my technique as I go. I’m planning on looking into remote blogging down the road to simplify things further, but we’ll see how I go – I’m hoping it’ll encourage more regular blogging, but I probably won’t look into the technicalities of setting it up for a couple of weeks at this stage.
