Bits of news - my leg, and our China trip

The last few entries are photos I've had on my phone for a while, but I thought I'd post them just so that you all know I'm still here. The bike rides were good fun. Made me feel human again, after having been stuck in the house for nearly a couple of months. Yesterday's ride was only about four miles, but it's quite hilly round here, and I am totally out of shape. I need to lose weight again, as I've been comfort eating and getting no exercise, except hauling myself up and down stairs on my crutches. I think I got through four family bags of sweets over the last 7 or eight days! Fat bloater or what? Yesterday, I on put a shirt that used to be roomy, and it was definitely tight around the belly. Oh. My. God.

I'm still unable to wear my funky new leg, not because it's too tight, but because it's bunching up my skin behind my knee (eew!) and pinching it. I think my leg's just changed shape slightly, and the old casting just doesn't fit any more. Not too much of a problem, as I'll be seeing my Prosthetist again next week, and maybe I can talk her into re-casting - she's reluctant to do so if she's only going to have to do it again a few weeks later: these laminate sockets are expensive to produce.

So I'm trogging along on my original leg, which fits OK, but limits how quickly and how far I can walk. The site of the wound I had is still very tender, and I have to be very careful about where the seams are on my stump socks, because they can press on that spot and become very uncomfortable very quickly.

This is the big news, if you don't know it already: because of the setbacks, we've had to give up and cancel the China trip. It's a walking holiday after all, and there aren't any guarantees that I could manage it. Instead of being something to aim for, for me it had become a looming shadow, stressing me out. I had been wanting a surgeon to take a look at the recurring sore area on my stump, but only because I wanted it resolved quickly so we could go on this holiday. The doctor put us right, saying that no surgeon would touch it while it was still healing (which it still is) and by the time it's healed, it would be too close to the holiday to heal properly from any surgery I had anyway. And, there is no guarantee that it would heal well either: I still have folds, creases and bumps in my skin from my amputation, so any new surgery may just add to these. We're really going to have to wait and see what happens with the healing process, so I'm just taking stronger doses of the neural pain inhibitor.

It was a huge disappointment to have to cancel it, but we are stuck with the situation, and we have to get on with it. It's not realistically feasible. At the moment I can only just manage walking up the village and back.

So, this summer we're going to have a couple of weeks in the Puerto Pollensa on Mallorca, which we've had very positive reports about from friends who have been there, and then the idea is to have a completely different Big Treat Trip, possibly a touring / camper-van holiday in New Zealand around Christmas. That feels like a decent substitute, doesn't it? We'll lose the deposit on the China trip, because the company we booked that through don't do this sort of holiday, but that's OK; we can live with that if we get something nice to look forward to again.