Spasticity and Splints (Part 3)

Eventually, I got back on my feet once my blisters had healed on 10 December 2024 but I only walked a short distance before having to stop. Apart from the feeling that my feet were moving in the splints, it felt fine to start with, but as I walked further, my feet began to hurt again. I stopped straight away because I didn’t want to put myself through all that with the blisters again.

Funnily enough, I knew exactly what the problem was: Besides from the new splints not being straight, my old splints have an inner splint that wrap around my feet, which helps keep them straight. I’ve always had issues with my toes curling and generally just being a pain in the ass, especially on my left foot, and as it shows in the photos on the right (bottom photo shows a close-up of the toe area), my old splints also had a shaped toe area as well as a small, thumb-sized indent, which helped to keep my toes flat.

These shaped parts are really important to keeping my toes flat, and I told the Orthotist this and asked for this to be added to my new splints. However, when they were ready to be collected, they didn’t have anything like this. When I asked about it, he said I didn’t need this because my feet “should” learn the correct position.

These new splints didn’t have anything to keep my toes in a good position, apart from an elastic toe strap, which was next to useless because my feet just came up out of it. My feet were in an awful position in these splints, so much so that the side of the splints were digging into the side of my feet, which was extremely painful! The photos above and on the left were taken on a good day, so my toes can screw right underneath my foot when it was really bad, but you can see that my toes aren’t in a good position, as well as the side of my foot pressing against the side of the splint. You could also see a huge gap underneath the arch of my foot in the photo on the right; I think this is partly because of the angle, but also because these splints do not support my arch, unlike my old ones.

Another thing that was wrong with these splints was the heel. Due to my involuntary movements, I find it difficult to keep my feet flat when I walk long distances because of my high tone (not spasticity) and the amount of concentration it takes to walk. I haven’t always had a heel on my splints, but when I didn’t, my heel came up out of the splints and caused rubbing. Since then, I have had splints with a slight angle at the ankle and a small heel, and this helps. However, the heels on my new splints were way too high, and this caused me more issues with my balance.