Um, my legs feel weird...

A couple weeks after the seemingly successful August surgery, things started to get a little strange.  I would be walking along in a straight line, and when I went to turn another direction, I would feel....wobbly, like I almost lost my balance while turning.  Then, over a period of about 48 hours, it seemed like my legs gradually transformed into rubber.  It started with some tingling in my toes, and worked its way up, until I could scarcely feel anything from the hip down.  Walking was nearly impossible, my husband basically had to half drag me to the car to get me to the emergency MRI my neurosurgeon's assistant had scheduled.  The images would reveal that the remaining bone in my T3 had collapsed, crushing the balloon full of cement, and that debris from this fracture, along with swelling from the injury, were compressing my spinal cord, causing the terrifying new weakness and numbness in my legs.  After the scan I was admitted to the hospital and introduced to the diabetes-inducing miracle inflammation fixer: the steroid Decadron.  Within another 48 hours on that drug the feeling began to return to my legs, I was given a walker and set up with physical and occupational therapy visits at home, and after a week in the hospital, was released to go home and relearn walking and stair-climbing.  This is just a temporary set-back, we told ourselves. 

I was so confident in my quick recovery that I got a little too cocky and wound up causing myself all kinds of unnecessary pain and inconvenience when I tried to go inside the house from the car without hubby's help.  My knees sometimes would bend and give out from under me when they shouldn't, and when one of them did that on the stairs going into the house, I fell and broke my arm. Talk about feeling foolish, and what a hassle!  Four weeks with my arm in a partial cast meant I had to get a special adaptation for my walker that would let me lean my forearm into a platform instead of trying to put weight through my wrist joint.  I certainly learned an important lesson about not trying to be too independent after that fiasco.  But still, as my arm healed and I got better at using the walker, we were convinced that in another few weeks or so, my strength would return and all would go back to normal.  

We couldn't have been more wrong.