Day by Day

Sue injured her ankle very badly last year while doing a marathon walk in unfamiliar countryside. She needed surgery and a cast that stayed on for six weeks. Although she’s a doctor and it was easy to follow the medical interventions (she had a few operations over three months), there were some very practical things for which she was entirely unprepared.

‘Crutches make your arms and shoulders hurt,’ says Sue, ‘and they limit what you can do and where you can go and how quickly you can do things.’ Making a cup of tea became an endurance exercise, with the teabags in one place, the cups somewhere else, and the jug and milk at other ends of the kitchen. What made the difference was the office chair from her study at home. ‘I could whiz around and do so much, could even cook a meal,’ she said, giving me the impression that the chair on wheels had liberated her.

Crutches make a loud clattering noise when they fall over but you have to keep them close by when not walking and they keep falling over. Who would’ve thought that propping them upside down is a more stable way of propping them up when you’re not using them? Sue worked it out but it occurred to her that we need better ways to give people these small clues that make it much easier to deal with the difficulties of recovering from her kind of injury.

One day she was surfing the web looking for advice about crutches and other things to help make it easier to be in her two-storey home. Someone complained in a blog post about how she had to crawl because of the difficulties she experienced with crutches and hopping around on one leg. Sue thought that ‘crawling was great!’ because she could go to the toilet in the dark at night without worrying about stumbling, and she could go up and down the stairs at home on her bum without exhausting herself.

‘We don’t think about these things as doctors or nurses,’ Sue observes. We tell our patients they shouldn’t bear weight for six weeks, and then when the moonboot goes on we give vague instructions like ‘use the crutches for a while then use one crutch and then go without.’ How do you know when to switch from one to the other? How do you know which side your crutch should go when you’re using only one crutch?

It would be great if we could find a way to share these practical experiences with others so that they don’t have to work their way through uncertainty like Sue did. ‘If you haven’t had the lived experience, it’s hard to give people practical advice.’ There must be an app for that….