DAS BOOT
No, I’m not talking about that German U-boat film, “Das Boot”. This is much more depressing than that. This is about that article of torture that medical fiends require you to harness to your foot after you have had some sort of break or strain in that appendage. Ostensibly, it’s for rehabilitation purposes and granted, it’s a better alternative than how they treat horses but still, the beneficiary of this treatment may have second and even third thoughts after electing to hobble down this path.
If you are familiar with use of the boot to lock scofflaw vehicles in place by clamping a wheel in place after an excess number of parking tickets have been ignored, you will understand how restrictive such a device can be.
This so-called medical apparatus, on first appearance, resembles an octopus; that is, with a shoe at its core with various lengths of Velcro tentacles of dangling from all sides. That’s not entirely accurate. If you’re familiar with Velcro, it doesn’t dangle freely, especially if there of 5, 6 or more of them in vicinity of each other. What they do is grab onto each other and refuse to detach. Imagine an octopus that wasn’t immune to its own suction disks. Surely it would wrestle itself into a death grip. This is what the attending physician passed on to poor Eunice simply by writing a prescription. Apparently, these things are assigned without a full-time attendant operator.
I hope you didn’t think I was going to strap this on myself. Remember, I’ve the victim here. I’m not the one driving the brand new car for the next convalescence.
As a matter of good faith, I did try to get into it. But when you think of it, many of us seniors switch to Velcro or slip-on shoes mainly to get away from tying shoelaces. Not that we can’t ty shoelaces so much as we can’t before we black out.
Here’s the logistics of it: if I lift a foot off the floor, I’ll fall over unless I hold on. If I hold on, I have no hands free to do anything else, least of all get all snarled up in boot tentacles. So, essentially, it’s Eunice to the rescue.
I am trying to be as independent as possible to take some of the strain off Eunice. The crutches that came with the boot are a new experience for me, with the added benefit of extending my reach to the cat when he thinks he’s in a safe place.
