When we went out shoe shopping recently, Catgirl and I took a rather odd detour from the parking structure to the shopping plaza.  We went up the stairs and then up and down the wheelchair ramps twice.

You walk so fast now, she said.

A few weeks into wearing my new Plie 2.0 robotic leg and I am, indeed, a faster walker than before.  Particularly downhill–the mechanics and control algorithm for this new leg making downhills so smooth (c-legs, on the other hand, are pretty choppy on the downhill).

In addition to wearing the new knee, I’m also wearing a Fitbit device to mark my number of steps and activity level.  My graph over the past two weeks shows some pretty dramatic changes from where I was several months ago (my daily step average increasing from 3483 to 4819 since August):

I’ve noticed only one small glitch with the new knee and that’s that when I have a long stretch of evenly-paced steps, after a few hundred paces it will hiccup a bit and I’ll end up dragging my toe for one step.  I imagine that this is some kind of firmware bug that can be ironed out.  But it’s a small glitch, and certainly livable except that it tends to affect my full trust of the limb (for the few steps after each hiccup I find myself reticent to put my full weight into a step).

Overall, the new knee technology is even better than I imagined. I still limp and I’m not (yet) running hurdles, but it’s a dramatic improvement over what I had before (yay, technology).