I attended  the fracture clinic 2 days after my ATR.

After waiting for over an hour past my original appointment time I was led into a cubical to see a doctor who quickly decided that the cast needed to come off for a better look and there was unfortunately a “bit of a wait” as the casting room was busy.

After a “bit of a wait” I headed into the casting room where a nurse cut off the cast and headed off to find the doctor. A different doctor came to see me and I was told that the original doc was busy.

I knelt on the bed and a squeeze (Thompson?) test was done on my calf. One minute I was kneeling on the bed and the next I was lying on a wet floor, looking up at a group of nurses and the doc looking down at me. Turns out I had passed out!

Once I was safely back on the bed the doc said that he wanted to send me for ultrasound as my foot was twitching when he was doing the squeeze test which led him to believe that I may only have a partial tear. Unfortunately the ultrasound department was about to close for lunch so I would have to wait around for about 1.5 hours until it was open again. I was really beginning to regret not bringing a book!

The ultrasound revealed I had a complete rupture and a gap of 8 - 10mm between each end of my now useless tendon. As I was lying on my front for the procedure I didn’t get to see it for myself but the lady explained it to me and got me have a little feel of my my mushy ankle and compare it to the healthy one. Yuk!

A nurse came and wheeled me back to the casting room and the, once again, headed off to find the doctor so we could discuss the way forward.

I was given the option of opting for either a surgical or conservative approach but when asked about the pros and cons of each he started off by telling me that surgery is “pretty brutal” and then failed to give me a well balanced argument for either option. He did throw in the fact that surgery was only really beneficial for people who had a gap of over 20mm between the ruptured ends of the tendon but I haven’t found any information to back this up.

After being suitably scared by the words “pretty brutal” I opted for conservative treatment, was put into a plaster and sent on my way.

All in all, I was in the hospital for a little over 5 hours. 4 hours of that time was spent waiting for doctors, ultrasound and cast removal / fitting!

It wasn’t until I got home that I started to question what I had been told by the doctor and started my own research into ATR and the merits of surgery and conservative treatments. Although there seems to be no real consensus on the best form a treatment I did note that surgical repairs offered a lower re-rupture rate than non-surgical - 4% for surgical and 12% for conservative.

The ATR has been disastrous for me as I won’t be able to return to work of any kind until I am completely healed so the re-rupture rate information led me to contact a foot and ankle specialist at a private hospital and an appointment was made for Tuesday 20th January - 1 week after my ATR.

Unfortunately getting the appointment with the specialist wasn’t as straight forward as it should have been. I was in contact with his secretary and tried to get some advice about his preferred way of treating ATR. The only information I managed to get back was that surgery was very expensive and isn’t an option for most people who don’t have insurance. It wasn’t until I emailed back with an insurance authorisation number that things started to move and the appointment was made. I was pretty pissed off at this point as it is presumptuous to assume what people can and can’t afford and also to assume that I was fishing for a free email consultation.