Tommy Collison

Well, is it still a cast update if I don’t actually have a cast on at present? Details, details…

I am currently cast-less; admittedly 3 weeks earlier than usual, but without-cast all the same.

Yesterday while watching a film with Mum, we noticed marks/stains around my right knee on the cast. I’d been feeling more pain than usual over the past 4 or 5 days but hadn’t conclusively been able to pinpoint the cause of the pain. Recently though I’d been thinking that it almost felt that the cast was rubbing, but hadn’t been confident enough in that thought to actually go about taking off the cast early.

Whatever about stiffness and even some pain, the sight of blood was definitely not one of the things we expected to see/happen while in the cast, and this prompted us to take it off early. Doctor Dad and Nurse Mum went at the cast with a pair of scissors (it’s a soft cast, luckily) and sure enough, when we had removed it, I’d a rather large wound on my knee which was caused by the cast rubbing off it.

Despite the sore, it was quite a relief to be free of the cast. Even though I could only bend my knee a small bit before pain started shooting through my leg, it was still more than the cast had ever allowed me. Since it was a pressure sore and not an infection, the pain almost immediately went away once the source of the problem (the cast) had been removed. It was replaced by an intense itching however and a lot of stiffness. I was almost surprised at how itchy I felt because that hadn’t been a problem when I had the cast on, when it would’ve been a lot harder to scratch (a friend of mine who had a cast had huge problems with itching and his plan of scratching his leg with a small plastic knife went awry when it slid down too far and he couldn’t retrieve it…)

The physio came back to us this afternoon – we’ll put back on the cast after making a hole for the knee to relieve the pressure and then secure it in some way. Progress! :)