Charcot Relapse

The prednisone prescribed following the retina reattachment surgery had many bad side effects and a major unknown good one that it reduced about 85% of the Charcot foot swelling. Unfortunately, when I had discontinued the prednisone in hopes of feeling better, the main Charcot symptoms of horrific swelling, elevated foot temperature and old feet odor resurged.
Contrary to statistics on Charcot, I have considerable pain associated with it. Tendon and nerve damage keep things burning and throbbing. Theoretically, Charcot patients are supposed to be some 30 years older than me and have such bad neuropathy that they don’t feel much of anything going on in their feet.
Basically, when the foot swells, circulation that is poor in diabetics to begin with is further reduced. This happened to me despite my attempts to keep the afflicted foot moderately exercised. I have had two disastrous side effects of the swelling.
The first is undeniable bone loss in the ankle. My right leg is visibly shorter than my left and there’s not much expectation that I will ever walk right again. The central bone in my ankle softened, split and rotated; the tibia no longer seats correctly. The heel bone also suffered loss of mass and integrity, mostly in its central area. While the leg is so massively swelled, nutrients cannot reach the center anywhere near as well as they should.
The second result is a constant risk to diabetics but also massively increased risk while the entire leg below the knee was swelled to more than twice its normal size: infection. In a matter of two days, a cut big toe went from being a little red to massively infected with dry gangrene.
I could neither see noir feel the opriblem as it developed, so consider myself very fortunate to have a roommate who has been attentive. The fast moving infection was caught early enough that the infection did not reach the bone. If it had, amputation of the two would have become necessary.
Things are healing well; the stay at Sturdy hospital ended almost two weeks ago, and not without giving me fodder for a few blog posts about what was an almost exclusively unpleasant experience.