Achilles Tendon Rupture Recovery

I can’t believe it’s already been 7 weeks since my surgery. The injury, the day of the surgery, and the day after the surgery are fresh on my mind as if it happened yesterday, but everything else is blended into a giant lump of clouded memory. The cloud of memory mostly consist of leg elevation, crutches, and laboring over simple things like going to the bathroom. A significant portion of the blur that I can remember is the time spent here on AchillesBlog, learning about other people’s experiences and gathering resource on ATR recovery. I have been very focused on this, as it was a way for me to cope with the injury. Sometimes, I realize it’s strange how my mind works..

A major milestone was the day that I started walking in the boot without crutches.
It’s too soon to tell, but I think the second milestone has been the past few days when I started to limp around without the boot. more on this later..

Seeing a physical therapist will be delayed by a little over a week because I am switching my health insurance plan. My new policy starts April 1st, and I need to wait until then to be able to schedule an appointment with a PT that has been recommended by a good friend.

I have been doing my own PT at home, and I have a towel underneath the desk that I constantly move with my foot. I’ve been doing the Home Exercises. Exercise: 1, 2, 3, 6, 7, 8

I am gradually spending more and more time out of my boot. I am extra careful around the stairs.
I’ve been able to limp around the house without too much trouble, and I’ve started to slowly use my toes to push off a little when walking. The limp is slowly turning into a normal walk, and I think it’ll take another couple of weeks to walk “mostly normally” at this rate.

I’ve been closely monitoring the condition of my heel so that I don’t push myself too hard. Outside of feeling irritation around the scars where I still have some scabs, my achilles tendon feels pretty good. When I do some light stretches without bearing any weight, I feel a bit of discomfort.. so I don’t push it with the stretching too much.

Here’s a nice shot of my scar.

Here’s another:

By the way, does anyone know if the sutures that’s holding the tendon together eventually dissolve? The thought of sutures being in my tendon forever sort of makes me feel uncomfortable.

There is some definite tightness in my achilles tendon, and my ROM is not quite as good as my good ankle. However, it’s improved since a week ago so I am pretty happy about that.

My calf muscle looks and feels like it’s back to normal, and there has been a considerable improvement in strength. I am amazed by it, but I cannot help but wonder if I am pushing it a bit too much.

I have to remind myself to slow down since I probably won’t feel much pain even if I damage it.

The pattern seems to be that I am impatient during the day, and I take some risks by being too aggressive. Then when I sit down to write my update, I realize that I am doing too much too soon, and that I need to slow down.

Today, I put on my normal shoes, and I slowly limped outside to get a cup of coffee.
I went to a nearby park afterwards and took a careful, slow, quiet stroll.

It felt almost like my heel was healthy again, and I enjoyed my coffee on the park bench while I watched the joggers run by.

This is just a quick update.
Brendan has been kind enough to maintain the AchillesBlog Injury Rehab tracker spreadsheet. Currently there are 23 people on the list, and it’s been fascinating following everyone’s progress. I would have never imagined that there would be so many people with the same injury gathering in one place. Thanks Brendan!

I’ve been doing some work on the web-based Injury/Surgery Date Summary Table, and I hope to expand on that. Hopefully everything will be automated so you can enter your complete information on the Achilles Profile. I think it’ll take several more weeks..

I’ve been very happy to see that everyone is using the Achilles Timeline widget. I hope it’s been handy!

Thanks to everyone, the amount of resource related to Achilles Tendon Rupture and rehabilitation has grown quite a bit, and I think I’ll be able to gain access to other papers that are restricted (requiring membership and $$). So please let me know if there are papers that you’ve found that you can only access the abstract to and would like to read the full text. If there are legal issues on posting those papers here, if we encounter that problem, I’ll do my best to summarize the findings and post that instead.

Please continue to let me know of other relevant information that you find, and I’ll continue to post it on the main site.

I’ve been experimenting with putting a small number of advertising on the main site. I have been feeling a twinge of guilt as I was afraid that it’ll lower the quality of the site. I’ve thought hard, and decided to only place ads where it makes sense and would not be too obtrusive to the content of the pages.

It’s just on the main site. Obviously there will never be advertising on your personal blogs, as they belong to you.

Product ads are placed on the “Things you might need” sections, since it can inform everyone about what some of the things are available to aid in your recovery. I hope that it’s beneficial to everyone who is browsing that section. The Amazon search box is on the top right, and please use it when purchasing items from Amazon.

There are a small number of ads right above the “Site-wide Recent Comments”. I’ve tested putting image ads in that section, but realized that they were too distracting. So I’ve just placed a few text ads there instead.

I hope these changes don’t degrade to the quality of the site. If everyone feels strongly one way or another, please let me know.

Also, please shout if you have any suggestions on how to make this site more useful.

Well, enough of the superfluous issues, and I hope everyone is well on their way to full recovery!

thanks!

Today hasn’t been a good day for my achilles as my impatience has gotten the best of me, and I am in a little pain. I feel tingling sensation around the region of my achilles where it was repaired, along with periodic pin-prick sensation that comes and goes. Sometimes it happens every few seconds. Then it dissipates, and comes back in 10 minutes or so.

The tingling sensation is eerily reminiscent of the feeling I had when I ruptured my achilles on the basketball court. I know definitely that it’s not re-ruptured, but could I have stretched it?

I have been at my desk working a good part of the past two days, and I usually have my boot off. I have a towel under the desk so that I can move it around with my toes. Also, I’ve been resting my foot on top of the PC that’s under the desk. While my leg is resting on top of the PC, I have been unconsciously resting my foot against the wall, subtly pushing at it with my toes, and also stretching the tendon a little against the wall. This might have caused the tingling sensation.

I’ve been gently massaging the tendon hoping that would somehow make this slight pain around the tendon go away, but it’s still there.

Has anyone had this feeling in their tendons? Hopefully it’s just part of the healing process, and that I didn’t damage it somehow. I hope I didn’t stretch my tendon as Brendan’s doctor warned him about.

I’ll be taking it real easy for the next few days until the condition improves.

As I was reading rckclimr2’s excellent physical therapy post, I was wondering if anyone is interested in helping by adding information that’s lacking on AchillesBlog. I haven’t added much more helpful information in a few weeks, as I think I’ve reached my limit on what I’ve learned about ATR and recovery.

I’ve been adding things here and there from what I have been learning from our conversations and your blogs.

As you read the main site, if you find things to be incomplete or would like to add more knowledge that you feel would help others who are following in our footpaths, please let me know.

If you are interested, you can create “pages” or “posts” on your blog. And then, I could either link it to you from the main site, or I can copy the information over. You could take what’s already there and make it better. Whichever way you prefer.

For example, the “Physical Therapy” section on the main site is inadequate. Thanks to Dr. Ross, I have that excellent pdf guide on home exercises and that’s about it.

Or if the information needs to be organized in a better way, or some new sections need to be added/expanded.. Maybe some of the things that I describe can be better explained. I am not a writer by trade, and I see there are many excellent writers frequenting the pages here.

For example, I would like to move all the sections under Chronology of Achilles Rupture to Recovery over to my own blog (achillesblog.com/dennis), and replace it with more concise explanations of each of the stages of injury to recovery.

I’d like the main page to be a community page where everyone can contribute on how best to explain and help people with ATR. Can it be an Open Source page? Please let me know. Suggestions, criticism, etc. You can also comment anonymously.

It’s been 5 weeks and 2 days since the operation, and I am trying to see if my recovery progress in on par with what’s expected.

For those of you not in a cast, what is your ROM (Range of Motion) like on your recovering foot?

In trying to point my toes up, my recovering foot is slightly less flexible. I’d say from the shin to the foot, the angle is around 85 deg (less flexible), whereas the other foot is at around 80 deg (more flexible)

Pointing my toes down, my recovering foot is much less flexible. From the shin to the foot, the angle is around 160 deg (less flexible), whereas the other foot is at around 180 deg (completely flat, more flexible)

Maybe it’s better to actually measure the angles accurately somehow, but I can’t think of a good way to do it. Instead, I’ll take a couple of pictures and post it soon.

Also, how does your achilles tendon feel when it’s compared to your other achilles tendon?

I’ve noticed that the recovering tendon is much thicker.
It doesn’t feel tender to the touch (or a gentle pinch), which I think it’s a good sign.

The ankle on the recovering foot feels slightly swollen compared to my other ankle. I’ve tried elevating my foot for a very long time and there is no change in the condition of my ankle.

How does your scar look?
Most of the scabs have fallen off. (Okay, I’ve picked at a few of them.. when they were peeling off on their own.. yeah I know, it’s gross.) About 90% of the scar feels like it’s healed fine, and the remaining 10% still feels a bit rough with dry skin and feels a bit sensitive to the touch.

Please let me know if what I described is (or isn’t) on par with what you’ve experienced if you are about 4-5 weeks into the recovery. Or if you are further along, let me know if you can remember how it was for you around 4-5 week mark, or even how it is right now. thanks.