keyoung74’s AchillesBlog

In my last post I mentioned that my new sports med doctor gave me 3 actions to complete to get me on the path to recovery.  Unfortunately, bullet 2 (referral to an ankle/foot ortho specialist) confirmed my biggest fear…….I have healed long. This explains my inability to gain plantar strength….but according to him my inflamed pereoneal tendon is subluxating because it is over compensating for what my achilles cannot do.

The only way to get back to reasonable functionality is through shortening surgery.  This doctor does them every 2 weeks but they are usually on patients who had undiagnosed achilles tendon ruptures.  We had quite a good discussion on the procedure and the outcomes.  The surgical risks are the same as the usual surgery and the recovery process is almost identical to what I had completed before.  I told him my benchmark is not to walk normal again but rather get back to playing sports and living my previous active lifestyle.  He is confident that I should be able to get back to an active lifestyle but has managed my expectations that I will never be 100% of .  I struggle with this because that is a vague description.

The big question now is why did this happen?  The surgeon could not answer definitively but he did say it is rare to have an outcome like this with a surgery.  He validated that the original surgery was done by a well respected surgeon.  Really the only answer is that the surgeon set the tension on the tendon too loose….or I somehow stretched the tendon early on during the healing process.  In one of my earliest posts I wrote that I was concerned with a fall I had with the crutches where I put my non-weight bearing foot down to brace the fall.  Despite being told by the surgeon that it was still attached I cannot help but think I stretched it here.

This is clearly a tough pill to swallow as I just crossed into Manhattan at 7 months in the proverbial marathon……and now I am heading back to the beginning with surgery likely at the end of August.   In the meantime I will start to prepare myself mentally and take stock of all the lessons learned going through this procedure the first time.

I see there are a few posts from a few years ago that have gone through this and I would really like to find out how they are now.  I am not sure if they still review this blog but if there is a way to get in contact it would be good to check in and get their perspective.

Kevin

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