Hey Fred, how many weeks have you been casted? I’m at four weeks casted, five weeks three days with the TPF. My leg has atrophied but not as much as I thought it would. My quad’s feeling okay and I can raise my affected leg no problem, but my ankle feels stiff when I rotate it — the kind of stiffness when it’s covered in scabs on both sides and doesn’t allow for much movement.
My TPF leg does feel “healed”, which is a huge part of my frustration at the course of treatment. I’ve been bad at times: I’ve gingerly tested out my foot on the floor, putting a tiny bit of weight on it and pressing my leg forward as if I were doing lunges (with hardly any weight on it). It feels a bit buzzy and tingly when I do that, but there’s no pain in my knee or anywhere else. I also put my TPF foot down for balance, sometimes with as much as 10% weight on it. I know my OS would not be happy to hear it, but I feel like I’d go nuts if I wasn’t doing anything.
Is your cast coming off because it’s been six weeks? Or just to get changed? And the pain you’re having in your knee — can you describe it? Does it feel warm and swollen, or a fairly normal size and of fairly normal temperature? Does your knee only hurt when you palpate it, when you’re working the muscles in your leg, or just in general?
Sorry…I grew up in a family of nurses, so the pseudo-nurse in me sometimes gets the better of me.