Stairway to heaven

It has been a good couple of days. Tuesday saw me on a home visit with an OT and a physio, sadly not to ours but my mum's. She has what is fast becoming the holy grail - a downstairs loo! They are very thorough here and prior to letting me leave here at the weekends they wanted to visit with me. I was on form and managed to bound up the step into the house (zimmer assisted) and whizz round the ground floor. Every chair in the house was measured for height and I then duly sat down and stood up from them all. Mum had set up a bed for me in her study, however one look at what can really only be described as a camp bed and I announced that I would like to try the stairs. I did set the scene in case of failure by saying that it would be good for the physio to see where we needed to concentrate our sessions.With a picture of the bed and a vision of the bad nights sleep it would surely provide firmly fixed in my mind I approached the stairs. It took a stick in one hand, the bannister and about 5 minutes but I got up them! Obviously that was the easy bit, getting down is MUCH harder. My left leg is so weak but going down stairs it really has to work. The stairs seem to be so much steeper when you feel you are simply dangling a limb over the edge of each step, still I made it down and have been deemed "safe with assistance". This basically means some poor bugger has to stand in front of me and if I fall they are coming wih me! I am so excited, this weekend will be the first time I have slept in a proper bed, upstairs and everything for over 2 months.
Still lest I get over excited by this its been back to physio and looking at my still relatively immobile ankle. The splint I have does a good job at holding the foot up so I can walk but I still need to work on regaining the movement. It is so very hard to isolate a muscle and to work it when you can bearly feel it. Movement was also so instinctive before that it is new and unnatural to think about tiny flexes.I spent most of an hour tensing my whole body and moving all my other limbs in the effort to lift my toes in order to flex my ankle. Didn't get anywhere! I try too hard and by tensing everything cannot get the tiny movements that I need.
Muscles are so weak the movement will not be like I remember, in fact at the moment it may be bearly there. It is all to easy to assume that if I try really hard and strain away that my ankle will suddenly spring into perfect full action. Later in the evening sat on my own I finally managed to get the small movement and flexed my ankle up, lifting my foot just the tiniest amount from the floor. Its bearly there but at least its there at all.
On a positive, note all this physio and activity is burning calories like never before. I can currently eat as much chocolate as I like. M & S chocolate coated fudge sticks - yum!