Ankle update — rough night. I have RLS (restless leg syndrome); it came on during pregnancy when I was 35, and has gotten increasingly worse as I get older. The nerves in my legs start acting up, and it feels like there’s something crawling under the skin, and they jerk when I’m trying to fall asleep. It’s pretty awful.
I’ve been trying to avoid taking medication for it, mostly so as to not add another med to the thyroid, anti-cancer, and ADD meds I already take, but I may be hitting my limits on that.
Usually my routine works reasonably well for avoiding my legs acting up:
– get some exercise during the day, so I’m tired for sleeping
– go to bed at basically the same time every day
– take a hot bath before bed, because the heat does something to the nerves, staving off the restless leg symptoms for about 30-45 minutes
– try to fall asleep within that window (so I’m pretty strict about switching to a Kindle and not looking at other screens after my bath).
Usually I’m asleep within 15 minutes, if I follow all that, and mostly, I sleep through the night, although sometimes they do wake me up — I have a plug-in massager on my nightstand, and I can use that on my calf muscles, and that usually calms them enough for me to fall asleep again. It’s a whole thing.
Anyway, what you may have figured out I’m leading up to is that it’s all been shot to hell by having my leg in a splint. You can’t get the splint wet, so no applying hot water.
I was okay on the first night — I think I was just so exhausted that I fell into sleep despite everything.
Yesterday, I was desperate to get clean, so we did the whole tape a plastic bag around my splinted leg and shower, and that was nice, but it didn’t address the restless leg stuff on my splinted right leg at all. And sure enough, when I tried to go to bed, it started acting up.
I spent 3-4 hours trying to fall asleep despite it, and I could catch little 15-minute naps, but then it’d wake me up again. Also, the impulse to jerk your leg around is not great if you’re trying not to move your ankle at all. The massager could only reach the sides of my calf a little bit, with the cast piece running all down the back of the leg.
Finally, around 2 a.m., I admitted defeat. I undid the whole thing — unwrapped the compression bandage, removed the cast piece, and unwrapped the cotton padding. Applied plenty of hot water to the leg, dried it, rewrapped the cotton padding, put the cast back, redid the compression bandage. Super-tedious when you’re sleepy, but not actually difficult.
I’m sure I didn’t do as good a job as the trained nurse, but this is just meant to hold me ’til Wednesday when I see the orthopedic surgeon for follow-up, compress the ankle a little to reduce swelling, and keep the leg from moving, and I think I did it well enough for that purpose.
The good thing is that all that let me check the ankle, and the swelling has gone down a lot — it’s barely visible now. So that’s a really hopeful sign.
But I think I’m probably just going to plan on unwrapping and rewrapping it every night until Wednesday so I can apply hot water. Yesterday’s broken sleep was pretty awful, and if I have that for a whole week, I’m going to be a complete disaster by Wednesday. I’m moving very slowly this morning on work already, sigh.
I’ve got a routine telemedicine check-up with my general doctor already scheduled for Tuesday, so I suppose it’s time to talk to her seriously about RLS medicine too.
Unfortunately, it’s an area that a lot of family practice doctors don’t know a lot about, and I may have to do some research in advance and bring it to her to look at, maybe see if I can get a referral to someone who specializes in RLS, if there’s such a person in the Loyola system…
Gah. At least Arya came to me where I was lying down on the couch this morning, trying to motivate to wake up and do something, and informed me that scritching him while he slept on me for fifteen minutes absolutely counted as ‘doing something.’ That was nice.