Spasticity and Splints (Part 6)

For me, AFO splints can mean the difference between walking and not walking.

I don’t technically have spasticity in my legs, but I do have high muscle tone. To put it simply, muscle tone is basically the amount of effort your body puts into moving the muscles. People who have high muscle tone either have spastic (tight) muscles, or a mixture of tight and loose muscles causing involuntary movements. People with low muscle tone struggle to move because their muscles are too loose. In my case, my splints help me control my legs. I can walk with my feet flat, but when I concentrate on other things like keeping my body upright or putting one foot in front of the other, my heels come up and I have to think about keeping them down. My splints keep my feet in a good position without me having to think about it.

Spasticity is where the muscles are tight all the time. Nobody mentioned spasticity to me during all the years I’ve had physiotherapy intervention, until 2018. In 2018, my college decided to stop me from walking completely, and my mum and I said that wasn’t going to happen because it would be detrimental to my physical well-being because I would lose the ability to weight-bear and walk if I didn’t. So, we got the local physiotherapists involved. They told me that I had spasticity in my legs. They only knew me for about a year, and only went on the conclusion from two hours a day, five days a week for two weeks. They didn’t get to know my body much because they were too focused on improving my walking pattern.

I’ve experienced spasticity and high tone, and the two are different; alright, they’re not completely different from each other because they sometimes have similar characteristics, but they are definitely not the same. I have high tone throughout my body and I use that to my advantage to keep myself upright, and if I didn’t have high tone, I wouldn’t be able to sit and move around on the floor, so it’s not always a bad thing. I have spasticity in my right hand and arm, and that’s definitely different from high tone.

I’ve tried different splints for my right hand and arm, but none of them have been appropriate for me. Firstly, I had a large arm support, which was in the shape of a spoon with a curved end and a small thumb area, and my arm got strapped into it. I got this at my first Botox injection appointment because the specialist wanted to try and train my hand to stay in a natural position as the body eventually gets used to the Botox. Unfortunately, my arm rebels against anything holding it, making my involuntary moments worse. I was hitting my face a lot with this clumpy splint on, so I stopped using it.

A few years later, I tried a hard plastic support for my thumb to keep it from adducting into my palm, and I tried that for a few days, but I kept injuring myself with it due to my involuntary movements. Then I tried Lycra gloves for my right hand, but they were too awkward to get on at the best of times, and impossible to get on when my Botox wore off. For some reason, my body fought against the glove too, which made me hot. So, for those reasons, I gave up with the glove. The idea behind the hand splints and gloves was to train my hand and thumb to stay open and relaxed, but unfortunately, these didn’t work.