Day 1 after debridement surgery 11/28/2012
On January 17th 2011 in Phoenix I qualified for the Boston marathon with a time of 3:28. I was pumped up and couldn’t wait to start my preparation for the next marathon. About 2 weeks later during a 7 mile recovery run (in hindsight, too long and too soon after Phoenix) I felt a pain in the back of my leg and naturally treated it like the many ankle sprains I had dealt with through the years, what a mistake. This started the roller coaster that is Achilles tendonitis and later tendonosis. So here it is 21 months later, I need debridement. In this time I have had a lot of conflicting advice on how to treat this. I have experienced firsthand the diametrically opposed approaches of orthopedist and chiropractors. I’ve had injections, Active Release Technique (ART), the “conservative approach” but all of this was too little and too late. If I knew then what I know now I think this could have been avoided. Anyway it is time to forget the regret, and there is a lot of it, and move on.
I wasn’t quite confident in any of the doctors I had seen so far but thought it was time to consider surgery. I hadn’t run in over a year and had given up hope. I could ride a bike just fine since it can be done without dorsiflexing but I was still severely limited in my activity. I had recently started a new job that involved a lot more walking than I had been doing and discovered, to my horror, that I was not even up to this. I wound up on crutches for a while from the strain. Then my wife remembered that a doctor she had visited a few years back was on a knee walker at the time recovering from Achilles tendon rupture surgery. I immediately arranged an appointment to get her advice and recommendation. She knows the medical community far better than I do and recommended with complete certainty what surgeon I should go see. She had a good basic rule for choosing a doctor for sports injuries- find out who the local college sends their football players to. I’m in northwest Arkansas, the doc doing my surgery takes care of these issues for the razorbacks too - this is the guy for the job. On 11/27/2012 I went in for debridement surgery.
The doc said the surgery went well. Going in there was a possibility that he would implant a prosthetic sleeve, he did not. He never intended to harvest the big toe tendon either as is often done in a repair like this. The doc told my wife that there was a lot more stitching to do than expected but that he was quite satisfied with the results. He thinks there is a strong possibility of a full recovery, whatever that means. To me that means running Boston, I doubt that’s what he meant.
If you are reading this blog then no doubt you have been to many other blogs also. I have read about others going from a similar low point as me to eventually running in ultra marathons – http://achillesblog.com/eastcoastrunner/ - or achieving new PR’s in various distances - http://dshumate.blogspot.com/ - so there is reason to be this optimistic. These two, among others, are my inspiration. Theirs and several other blogs have been immensely helpful in my decisions so far and in understanding what to expect going forward. I would be remiss in not also mentioning coach Dean Hebert’s running blog. I hope my experience will be useful to someone after me, that’s why I am writing this. Right now I need to keep the foot off the floor, elevated above my heart, and be very careful moving around. One slip can be devastating. The doctor I mentioned above did slip and fall and went through this twice – scary. Well that’s all that is fit to print at this point. I will post again in about two weeks after my first follow up visit.
