Under The Knife

After a slight mishap last weekend and 4 trips to the hospital later, we've all decided that the best thing to do is it have surgery on my Achilles Tendon to sew it all back together. The ultra-sound scan revealed that I have indeed re-ruptured it.

The chances of re-rupture after surgery is significantly decreased as opposed to passive treatment and apart from the usual complications involved with surgery, the benefits are clear. So, next Tuesday I go under the knife.

The big draw back is that the recovery time is the same and I will be in a damned cast for 6 to 8 weeks, so I will have to relive the frustration of being immobile all over again.

This isn't the case at the moment as they've given me a brilliant piece of kit called an Aircast. The cast has a heel raise and you pump up the cast in 4 places to surround the injury with an air bladder. It supports the whole leg and you can put your full weight on the leg without any discomfort whatever. Robo-tracker or what!

I really wish that they would give me one of these after the Op but it seems this won't be the case.

Billy doesn't really care what cast I have. I think we'll borrow him for a couple of months to keep me company.

Apparently, the surgeon won't know exactly what he's going to do until he opens up the ankle. It will depend on how much the tendon has retracted. It might be a case of simply sewing the two ends together or, if the tendon has retracted too far, he will have to cut a bit of tendon from my toe and stitch that onto the Achilles. There's two in-between procedures which he tried to explain to me, but I was a little bored by then (having already spent 6 hours at the hospital on this occasion) and resigned myself, in a slightly self-pitying manner, to my fate.

[Image from www.pyroenergen.com]

This state of mind didn't last too long and even as they were extracting vast amounts of blood from my arm for the pre-op tests, I started planning a "last" trip to the woods on Sunday and a project or two during my recovery period.

At least I know what to expect and I console myself knowing that all being well, I fully expect to be out of the cast on 20th March, just in time for spring!

Thanks for the visit.

Pablo.