The light at the end of the tunnel

am finally seeing the light at the end of the tunnel from my ankle surgery that I had in December.  I had severely damaged the ankle in a fall in May 1982 and after having it repaired and spending that summer in a cast thought things were all  right for a few years.   In  1994 I was beginning to have some problems and went to see about it and could have had fusion then, but the kind of fusion I would have needed would have ended with a below the knee amputation once the cast had been removed after three-six months.
I decided to let things alone and just see what happened and in June 2014 while training with Thermo my guide dog in New York I started having problems walking correctly, or more like limping.  After getting worse I got a hold  of a young ankle specialist and after three months of x-raying and other testing On December 8, 2015 I had a full ankle fusion and tibial bone graft on my right ankle.  Since then I have been in one form of a cast or another, including a soft plaster splint, a beautiful Carolina blue fiberglass cast and now a very bulky aircast.  As it stands now since I have only been weight bearing for about one month is that if the wxrays look as good as they did one month ago, Dr. Jackson will consider the ankle healed and will let me start riding my exercise bike again as well as working Thermo my guide dog.  I am assuming I will either be in some sort of light brace or be in a compression brace for my ankle and then the fun part of basically learning how to  walk again on that foot which I already know from taking it out of the aircast periodically that the entire leg is extremely weak, so we will see.  It's just nice to know that there's light at the end of the tunnel.