Yesterday was day two of working on the second generation of the new leg project, and it was a long one.  It started with John telling me that the check socket from the last trip wouldn’t submit to being re-shaped to the new cast.  He heated it in the oven, pulled it over the new model, applied vacuum… and when it cooled, it went back to the same shape it started out.  So we started the day with a completely new check socket.

No sugar coating it, what we started with was un-walkable.  We spent the morning heating, cooling, shaping and working at it.  The check socket is made of a clear plastic that can be heated and re-shaped.  Of course, it’s a little tough to isolate the effects of the heating to very specific spots.  Also, the tolerances inside the socket very tight.  A millimeter here or there can change the fit in significant ways.  So we’d get one spot fixed, and get thrown off a little somewhere else.  I can’t tell you the number of times the words “it shouldn’t do that” were said.

As the day wore on, we kept plugging away.  A fix here and there, but it felt like we were getting nowhere.  I think had anyone walked into that office mid-afternoon they’d be pretty leery of starting up a conversation with either of us.  We had fallen into quiet, frustrated concentration.  We were ready to give up on that check socket, and I was ready to chuck the whole seal-in liner idea, leg and all into the sea.

We debated our options, and talked each other in and out of scrapping the current effort a couple of times over.  John was pretty convinced I was fed up with the effort that even if we did sort out the issues I wouldn’t accept it.  For my part, I thought John believed in this solution for my leg a little too much to change strategies.

Human nature is tough to deal with that way.  It can be difficult to separate frustrations from objective evaluation.  Then again, there isn’t an objective machine that can appreciate the subtleties of feel.  What feels “right” can be what feels normal, but the tough thing, what’s “normal” could be actually an adaptation of some asymmetry a body has developed around an injury.  What’s technically correct on the other hand, can feel like a train wreck under foot.  We used the gait analysis mat over and over again to figure out stride length, timing and weight.

Finally we agreed to make one more adjustment on to the socket, and if there was no love there, we’d start over with a different liner, and a completely different approach.  There was a subtle difference in the way my hamstring was tied into my amputation that makes it track across the back of my leg as I walk that is atypical to the way the hamstring normal moves.  He made a space for that to move, and were closer than we’d been all day.  It was worth continued work.  You could see the energy in John’s demeanor transform.  Suddenly he was bright again, bouncing as he moved from task to task, singing along with the radio, whistling, almost giddy.  We were back in business, on the right track.

But we got closer with each try.  By about 5:00 I was walking on a pretty damn good leg.  Not perfect, but good.  Of course, we’d been running my leg through the ringer all day, so it was pretty pissed off.  So, we agreed that we were getting to the point that it was tough to tell if we were trying to work around a socket issue, or swelling from hard work on the leg.  We called it a day.

Today I have a leg that is holding on like a bull dog.  It’s a little tough to get into, but it’s really solidly in place and stable.  We’ll see if we can get the few rough spots out of the fit, then I’ll head home to work horses in the morning.  Fingers crossed, but I don’t think this one is about luck.  It’s about perseverance.