Sleeping with a Fibular Fracture

This is a cross post from the hammock camping yahoo group.

As I reported earlier, I fractured my left fibula 23 days ago while hiking the AT in Maine.

I have continued to improve steadily and have been walking on my leg fairly well for a week now. It is not up to full strength yet, but the swelling is down and I no longer need a splint or a walking stick.

In preparation for some car camping I am planning for early next week (Balsam Mountain in the Smokies) I checked to make sure that I can use my hammock. Unfortunately, I can't do that yet.

In all of the 5 or six comfortable positions I usually use in a hammock to sleep, I have found that my foot is pushed one way or the other. And pushing my foot in a twisting motion and then keeping it in that position still hurts. I can partly overcome those problems by using a bag of clothes as a small pillow to lift the foot so that it neither is twisted, bent, or dangled, but it is a bit complicated to set that up, and staying in one position for long with my leg in its present state of healing causes me cramps...

So I am reduced, for the car camping episode this coming week, to sleep flat on the not so flat surface of the earth. I can't believe it is happening to me. Pray for my sanity. Maybe I will still dream of swinging free of the roots and stones of the ground.

I hope that in a week or two the bones will be knit together well enough to allow me to sleep in the hammock once again.

Risk
Ground Sleeper (Prov)