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Starting off this post with yet another apology for the time it has taken to write this one up! Things just seemed to pilling up at home and just didn’t seem to find any time to start writing all this up. Ok, so enough excuses…

I shall probably avoid too many pictures in this post as not sure anyone really wants to see multiple pictures of my awful feet and stitches! But for those really interested, here is a link to the stitches and one to the comparison of the legs 😉

So the advice I got from the doctors when leaving hospital was that I was to put a maximum of 15kg on my left leg for the first three weeks, and then I could build this up by 10kg per week after that until I could hold my full body weight. They also said that after three weeks I could start with some light cycling at home, but it would be quite some time before I would be able to ride outside, mainly due to the risks if I had to stop suddenly or had an accident. I was also signed off work for another 3 weeks and was advised to basically keep my foot up and relax, in order to help with the swelling and recovery. I was also prescribed blood thinners (an injection every morning – I hate needles), and painkillers.

So with this advice, there were a couple of problems. The first problem was that for the first week after the surgery, every time I stood up and there was a rush of blood back to the ankle, I was in a world of pain for a couple of minutes. This required me taking a few painkillers to help get through that… Mainly ibuprofen as that also helped the swelling. The second problem was that I was now at home alone. Now, this led to the issue of being able to carry things around, even simple things like – how do I have a cup of tea on the sofa? The answer to that was, I couldn’t. I would make my way to the kitchen, and sit on a stool there for a couple of hours as I made breakfast, had a cup of tea, took my medicine and read a bit on the tablet. This was the easiest way to actually do anything as food and drink were all within easy reach! The downside to this was that I wasn’t resting my foot…

Of course, the next thing was actually keeping my fridge stocked as I didn’t want to keep ordering takeaways! And all I can say is thank goodness for home delivery of fresh supermarket goods now! I am not normally a big fan of doing grocery shopping this way as I never seem to get exactly what I was after, nonetheless, in this case it was good enough.

So being home alone as well, I slowly had to develop systems for getting things done. One of the best things I did was to carry a rucksack with me everywhere. This let me more easily move things around like books, clothes and food around a bit more easily. The other thing was working out how I could move a cup of tea around my putting chairs in strategic places to act as stepping stones to move the cup! I thought it was pretty genius!

So all in all, the first couple of weeks were spent in a bit of pain, sat in my kitchen or on the sofa, trying to rest up as much as possible. There wasn’t a whole lot that I could do, which is also why I was fairly active on all the chats and facebook too, haha.

One of the really fun things I did was sitting on discord for a couple of our Friday races and following the races and having a go at being a DS. Not sure how much use everyone found it, but it was certainly a different way of following the race and pretty interesting too!

So, I next time, I will start looking at how I tried to keep my fitness as best I could and the early endeavours back on the bike! Hopefully it won’t be too long before I get that post up!