After a surgery you may have questions regarding the protective cast you have on your residual limb.
Some of those questions might be :
How long do I have to wear this protective cast after my amputation?
Why do I have a protective cast on after my amputation?
How do I itch my residual limb if I have a cast on?
Will I need a revision to my amputation?
We will help answer these questions and more…
Healing & A Protective Cast After Amputation Surgery
After an amputation has occurred, in most cases your residual limb begins the healing process. If the healing goes backwards, the doctor might need to take the amputation to a higher level or do other things to avoid infection and improve overall blood flow to the residual limb. We have seen people progress from a toe amputation to a BK to an AK over time unfortunately. We are not hear to spook you either. Not everyone gets a revision. Not everyone goes from a toe amputation, up to an AK, but they do happen.
Sometimes those revision surgeries can be separated by a couple days, sometimes more.
A Protective Cast
Some doctors may put your residual limb into a protective cast right after your surgery. We have seen fiberglass casts and/or plaster casts placed on after a surgery to protect the residual limb. Obviously, it is best not to put anything inside the cast or to avoid sticking pointed objects inside of it in order to get to that itch you might be having. It is best to tell the nurse so they can help you deal with that with different measures. This cast can be very helpful because it will protect you from an impact or a fall directly after surgery.
It is not so much what the cast is made of, but rather what the cast does to provide a protective barrier for the incision. This is true as long as the residual limb and incision line stays clean and the amputee can tolerate the protective cast provided. The potential downside is not being able to monitor your skin, but the hopes are that if your doctor put it on then it is quite possible that they have done many of these before (remember) and they wouldn’t do it if they thought something bad would happen.
This protective cast can sometimes stay on for 2 weeks approximately. Our team has removed them and starting prosthetic treatment at this two week interval, but this is not the way it goes for everyone. The prosthetist does not always remove the protective casts either. Sometimes the surgeon’s team will remove the cast instead and that opens the door for the prosthetist to begin initial stages of treatment.
Some people might report to you in the future that they had a plaster cast or one from fiberglass to protect their residual limb after surgery. While, other amputees do not even get a cast at all after surgery that is directly applied to their residual limb. Instead, the physician at this point in time and may request a good amount of bed rest or a rigid removable dressing instead of the protective cast. (More to come on rigid removable dressings shortly.)
You can now start to see how the protocols vary. It is not our intention or place to say what is right or wrong in this regard, we just want to show you that these nuances can exist. One form of treatment is not necessarily “more right” than another.
Perhaps it is the physician’s training that dictates the treatment regarding a protective fiberglass cast. That is the material you see a lot when someone breaks their arm, for example. Perhaps the situation revolving around the amputation dictates if and when a protective cast is provided. These kinds of casts can provide a helpful barrier in case of impact but at the same time it is not necessarily easy to monitor the skin as they are not necessarily transparent. If the priority, per the medical team is to monitor the integrity of the skin each and every day then different approaches might take place.