Welcome me to the club

I think bad shoes can contribute to tendonitis/tendonosis but because of the force required to rupture your Achilles, I am not sure your shoes can contribute a whole lot to that. I still don’t wear the shoes I was wearing when I ruptured. Partly because they are soccer/football shoes and I can’t play yet and partly because it is fun to be angry at something. Tee hee! Just joking!

Well, i was wearing ordinary shoes and just walking, so who knows!, I am wearing the very same shoes today, so should I be extra careful ???

Annie

Haha, glad someone else is thinking along these lines.

That’s funny that you asked those questions about your shoes. I threw away the nike basketball sneakers I was wearing when I had my ATR because they reminded me of the injury and are bad luck.

Addict,

The image on your post depicts the tear. The tendon is white coming off your heel and you can see where the tear is, it should be continous and yours is obvious. The other images on your link were too dark to actually see. I would do a google search on Ruptured Achilles MRI and I’m sure you’ll be able to find one and then correlate with yours. I actually had them video my surgery, being a Doc I wanted to see details.
Read as many posts as possible so you’ll get an idea of what’s in store for you.
Good luck and let us know if you have any other questions

Doc Ross

A,
Well I’ve had a good look and can’t see anything obvious. A few people on the site have asked for a copy of their operation report. These reports are done by the surgeons either during or just after the procedure - ask for yours that should clear up in your mind exactly whats going or gone on
Richard

gw0508, read your story - it’s great that you can write with humor about this kind of stuff! Also happy to see that your recovery is going well now, after all that trouble with finding the doctor.

Edforman, thanks for the note, it’s certainly reassuring. Orhto2 said there was no question that there was a complete rupture, and confirmed that ultrasound may be unreliable, if the ends of the tendon are just dangling close to each other.

I ended up having surgery yesterday, will post more details shortly.

Addict,
Bad luck. I have a similar story. When I got hurt, the urgent care folks said I had a complete rupture. Then it took my insurance guys about 3 weeks to send me a referral to see an orthopedist- a hand specialist! What a zoo. He told me I didn’t tear the Achilles, just a muscle tear and an MRI would be a waste of money. You’ll have to check my blog. It’s a long story. Finally 6 weeks after the injury, I finally saw an orthopedist who knew what he was doing and said he thought it might be a rough surgery & recovery because of scar tissue buildup. I’d been hobbling around for 6 weeks in a boot just like yours! I’d also been doing lots of ice & elevation, foot circles and toe wiggling. The short of it is, once he got in, thankfully, there wasn’t as much scar tissue buildup as he expected. I’m almost 5 weeks from my surgery and am out of my cast & in a boot, going a good part of my day 2 footed! When he did the Thompson test, he suspected I had some attachment as there was a very faint response. He found it hanging by a thread. Good luck on your surgery!

Addict:

I had a somewhat similar experience. Ortho #1 said complete tear, needs surgery, but humored me and ordered an MRI. MRI read a partial tear with lots of tendonosis. After Ortho #1 took forever to read the MRI and wouldnt return my call, I saw Ortho#2. He said he trusted the Thompson test more than the MRI - MRI could show partial tear even if its just the sheathing that is still intact. Ortho #2 convinced me to do the surgery and reported that I had a complete tear (that had retracted into my calf). Had I not had the surgery, it would not have been good.

Hope my experience sheds some light…

Ed

Addict: Tough questions. All I know is that the report I got from the radiologist that read my MRI gave a different diagnosis than the foot and ankle orthopedic that did my surgery. The radiologist thought a certain finding was a huge issue. The orthopedic said it was no big deal but a different finding was the big issue. I went with the specialist. I have not heard of people having fever with an Achilles rupture but I am not a doctor. I have also heard of people having their Achilles fixed weeks after a rupture and they ended up running and sprinting with the best of them. Good luck!

Smish, thanks for the detailed reply.

Haha, yes, good drugs is always a silver lining in our situation. However, I hardly have any pain in my foot. So - I take 400 Ibuprofen every 8 hours to control the fever.

Fever is a weird one - I’ve been running a temperature of up to 40 (104). Ibuprofen brings it down, but then it starts to climb back up again. I have absolutely no other symptoms – no coughing, sore throat, stomach problems – nothing. Just the temperature with the headache and weakness that it brings with it.

I wake up a couple of times every night, cold and soaking wet. It’s been 10 days now, with no signs of improvement. Some of my friends said that broken bones can sometimes cause temperature. All the doctors are telling me that it is not related to the injury. To me it just seems too coincidental – started at the same time, and I have no other symptoms. Can Achilles rupture cause prolonged fever? Can this be a sign of complications?

Regarding selecting the doctor – after reading your comments, I feel reassured that dumping the spine doc was the right thing to do.

On the other hand, as days go by, I am wastin

Addict: Uh, what was causing you to have a fever? Good job keeping your wits about you. I think I would be crazy by now. First off, who exactly read your ultrasound? Was it a radiologist or an ultrasound tech.? Even then, a radiologist knows a little about a lot of things. A specialist doctor (foot and ankle orthopedist) knows a lot about a few things. An ultrasound tech, (here in the US) knows basic anatomy and physiology and how to safely operate the ultrasound machine. They don’t get a “ton” of medical training here. They shouldn’t be reading an ultrasound at all. My point is this #1) I would NEVER allow a spine doctor to fix my Achilles (well unless we were stranded on a dessert island and he was all I had). #2 What was the education and specialty of the person that actually read your ultrasound? #3) If you do have some tendonitis, there may be an underlying problem that caused your rupture (like equinas) and probably only a foot and ankle specialist would think to look for that.
I ruptured 2 years ago. I, not knowing, allowed an on call orthopedists to do the reattachment. He got the thing together. The whole proce

Hi Richard,

Thanks for the note - read your story, it really must be crushing to have to go through this all over again.

Regarding my case — you’re probably right, I should have kept my mouth shut about insurance. It might be just my perception, but I feel a bit like I was caught in the middle of favor trading between doctors.

Hello addict,
Bad luck with the injury old boy. You appear to have been caught between a rock and a hard place in terms of who the main organisors of your care are. The issues here are that the boundaries between the private health sector and the NHS are becoming rather blurred - it used to be that they ran independently of each other but now the need for efficiency and sound economics mean that they are increasingly working more closely (I wouldn’t say together ) Retrospectively what you should probably have done is let the NHS deal with it all and used your private insurance to get the best in terms of convenience for you. What I mean by that is many of the surgeons work in both sectors so you could probably have been seen by the same Doc all the way through your process and had the continuity that would have brought ‘

Don’t be afraid to insist on a clear plan from now on - if you read my blog you’ll see how a bad decision can rebound on you later.

Good luck, keep in touch.

Richard