Good News and More Good News

I had my 3 month follow up the surgeon yesterday. As I am sure you could tell in my last post, I have been a bit anxious leading up to this week’s doctor visit. As much as I am so excited about the possibility of walking sans crutch, it’s also very scary. Just the increased use of my leg going to one crutch has added pain to my life I wasn’t having before–pain that caused me to wonder if the tumor was back or if I had broken the bone. Well, worry no more…from the visit with the doc I have good news and then I have more good news.

Good news
Bone is healing great and no sign of any tumor in my femur or in my lungs (the preferred place of migration for the giant cell tumor). What a relief! I pointed out the areas where the pain was to the surgeon and he looked at the MRI a little closer in those spots and didn’t see anything of concern. More relief. With my muscles so weak, lots of things are moving around that aren’t really supposed to, as we remedy that hopefully the pain will subside. So with everything good on the inside, what does that mean about what I can do? That’s the more good news.

More good news
I am now officially released from having to be tied to the crutch. With that being said, it doesn’t mean goodbye to the crutch forever. What it does mean is we can get more aggressive in getting these old muscles working my my new and improved bone. So you may still see me with a crutch, but I will be venturing out a bit more without it and hoping to retire it very soon.

Also, I can get back to swim and bike training as opposed to just swimming and spinning. Of course I’m going to need to rebuild a base, but now is the time to get to it. In addition, I can add the elliptical to the list of things I can do–that much closer to running. The timeline on running looks to be another 6 weeks or so, which really is just around the corner, so I better get all the components of this leg working together again.

27 Days of Walking
According to my coach, it takes 27 days to make a habit, so he started blogging daily about a month ago and has continued along the streak. The thing that I learned by watching him through this experiment was that a lot can happen in 27 days, especially as we undertake something new. Well today was day 1 of walking without a crutch. Full disclosure: I have been walking on the special treadmill at PT that unweights you for the last couple of weeks working on my gait in the anticipation of getting the okay to walk at this weeks visit. And I requested the chance to walk my last session of PT before my doctor visit just to make sure I am doing it right, because it didn’t quite feel right the times I cheated at home. But as far as walking out in the real world, today was the first day. Excited to see where the next 27 take us–hope you will join me along the way for a step or two.