So after some great jumps, and lots of riding and carriage driving, I’m back in Virginia to take another shot at getting a socket and leg that works. The first try has been… educational. That’s how it goes when developing a new leg. The adage “try, try again” is the mainstay in creating a new leg.

Basically my leg rejected the new socket design on many fronts. The seal-in liner idea has merits. It does provide some pretty good suspension, but our socket design was a little too radical in its change for my leg to handle. The previous socket was a fairly round shape with a few mild contours. That was great for a couple of years, but a residual limb changes over time. We matched those changes with a more contoured shape, the most obvious over the outside of the shin. However, that didn’t really accommodate the activity level of flexing my leg does as I bounce from one activity to the next. At its best, the new socket was rock solid in high activity levels like long lining horses. At it’s worst… well there were times I couldn’t get the leg off quick enough to ease the muscle cramps that went all the way up to my hip.

The silliest episode was when I used the seal-in liner with my skydiving leg. The extra volume that the liner took up worked really well, because that socket was much too big on my leg with my old liner. I had a great day of jumping at Skydive Pepperell, packed up my rig at the end of the day and sat down to take my leg off. Uh oh!
If you recall, the seal-in liner creates a vacuum seal from inside of the socket, as apposed to a sleeve which seals it from the outside. As I stand in the socket, air is pressed out through a check valve that doesn’t allow air back in, so you get a vacuum seal. On the leg that is designed to have the seal-in suspension, there is a nifty little release mechanism in the check valve that allows air to be re-introduced below the seal. So, instead of a one way valve, it will allows air in as I extract my leg.
A socket designed for a sleeve, with no seal-in liner, has no need to have a release valve, since the seal is broken when the sleeve is rolled off the socket. Instead it has a strictly one way valve, that can’t be released. On my skydiving leg the check valve is buried under the foam and “skin” that covers the leg to make up for leg volume. So there I was, leg firmly sealed in place by the clever little liner, with no release mechanism to let air in under the seal! It was a few curious moments wondering how the hell I was going to get the leg off. I tried fishing down through the foam under the cosmetic cover to find the check valve, so I could detach it, but it was well hidden, and too difficult to get to. Finally it occurred to me to shove a pen down inside the socket between the seal and the socket wall. Phew! Silly!

Anyway, the first generation of the 2013 leg kinda beat the shit out of me. While it was great for 4 or 5 days, the honeymoon ended too soon. A week into the new socket and things started to go south. My hamstring started to get compressed, which led to swelling, which leg to more compression, more swelling, more compression… and by the end of the following week I couldn’t even put the leg on.

I had to switch back to my old leg, which was instructive in a few ways. First, was remembering how comfortable the components of that leg are. The foot combined with the shock and rotation device are pretty hard to beat. Second, while the seal-in liner is really solid, the knee sleeve is damn convenient, and holds the leg more completely. Third… good god, the old socket was uncomfortable as hell and needs to be retired! That only lasted a day or two but they were pretty tough days. That did prompt me to dump the Ossur foot that we’d been trying out under the new socket. It just wasn’t as good a foot as the one I’ve been wearing. We never did get rid of the post stride vibration that plagued the foot. The elevated vacuum that the pump in the foot may have been a help, but it was hard to tell with the socket being rather hard to to take. The past week and half I’ve been kind of of just getting by. When I park handicap (a true sign that I’m in pain), nobody gave it a second thought as I gimped into the store. Sometimes it wasn’t too bad, other days I’d literally pull a bloody stump out of my socket. I’ve never been one to take pictures of all the nasty disgusting that happens to my body, so I’ll leave it to your imagination what a white gel liner looks and smells like after a day of sweat, sloughed off skin and scabs mixed in a nice dark red ooze in a little pool at the bottom. Ya, it’s that yummy. Bet you want to eat that moist and chewy brownie now!

So here I am in a comfy hotel room in Virginia after re-casting for gen. II of the 2013 leg. It’s a bummer to have to start again, but that’s par for the course. I’ve never been able to build a new socket after just one check socket design. We’ll take design elements that seemed to work with the current socket, and try to improve where it isn’t working. Actually, John is taking the actual check socket I’ve been walking in, and re-shaping it over the cast of the leg we made today. Hopefully that captures the parts that were working of the new shape, but help guide the changes we need to make it workable for the new leg. Tomorrow it will be a repeat of three weeks ago. Fit, adjust, fit, walk, adjust, walk and so on. We’ll see how we do. It’s all relative really. If I were an above knee, I’d be more than 5 times as challenged, let alone what those with multiple amps face. It doesn’t really matter though, we’re all trying to be what we want to be, and that what makes it more difficult for one person doesn’t make it any easier someone else.

It’s kind of an interesting thought really. I was just watching Avatar sitting here in the hotel room a little while ago. The part that stuck with me the most about the movie this time was how the main character is a paraplegic, but when he’s transported into the body of the Na’vi, he’s fully able bodied again. The character is constantly going back and fourth between inhabiting the Na’vi body, and his human paraplegic body throughout the movie. I could help but feel the freedom of movement that the character would be feeling every time he stepped into the Na’vi body. Yet he’s dependent on a machine and computers to facilitate his living as a Na’vi (kind of Neo going into the Matrix if you haven’t seen Avatar). Then he returns to his human form, and while quite adept in that form, I could feel just how restrictive the paralysis would be in comparison. It’s not insurmountable, it’s just a damn pain in the ass.

Being slightly disabled as I am (let’s face it, what I’ve got is like disability-light), depending on hardware to give me that fully able bodied ability, feels kind of similar. For a little while I am really 100% able bodied, without hesitation, inhibition or limits. Then a few little glitches, and things start to slow down, like a little interruption in the code. Then one little glitch leads to another, and another. While no one of those things such as an ingrown hair, or a little rub would be enough to deeply impact my abilities, the combination of them is pretty damn debilitating. What you get is something that you can work around, but it’s a damn pain in the ass, and you just don’t do things as well or as fully as you did when it wasn’t a pain in the ass. So here’s to taking a big old thorn out of my ass this week.