luis’s AchillesBlog

It has been a year since I ruptured my Achilles tendon and in a week it will be a year since the time I had surgery. The tendon feels great, still tight but good enough as to be able to sprint I think.

I have had two ankle sprains in the same foot and a Posterior Cruciate Ligament rupture in the other leg, this last one at around 9 months post surgery. So for those that are just starting this journey I would advise to be very kind to the uninjured leg while the other leg becomes functional again. And as you return to intense activity again, work on the ankle in the injured leg since after the long immobilization it becomes very weak.

Hi all,

I was finally back to training two weeks ago. A week ago I had my first soccer game since my ATR in April,  and 2 more games since then. They were light games, I was just passing the ball around and changing directions in a very control manner. I do not feel ready to sprint yet but I am sure I will come with time. I push myself to never let the tendon get cold while playing, I am moving at all times, whenever I stop moving, I get back to motion slowly, after each game I can feel the tendon getting a really nice stretch.

The tendon feels strong now, but it still feels tight specially in the morning, I am afraid it might always be that way, I guess it could be too early to know that?  I have also noticed that I am a little more balanced than before the injury. Before, only my left side (injured side) would be very strong and balanced, but it seems that the PT has helped my less dominant leg too.

Funny thing is that my Surgeon thinks that I am not even jogging yet, he said he was going to let me do that after my next appointment which will be today in 3 hours. I am not bragging about not following his protocol, but if you read my older posts you will see I have not felt he cares too much about my recovery, it might be I am just too sensitive. So far I am very happy with the results of my surgery and think he is a great Surgeon, I guess that is what matters right?

I hope everyone is having a nice recovery!

Hi everyone,

Today I have been told by my PT that I do not need more PT, that I can do the rest of the recovery from home by stretching and continuing the exercises. She also said I could start doing some light training to play soccer again but to work incrementally towards it. I am really excited about it, I am also aware I do not want to risk it playing competitively yet (not even in a month from now), but I think I can do some pick up games where I just jog and pass the ball around for now.

I told my PT that I still need to recover a lot more ROM and coordination. My PT gave a soccer ball and ask me to dribble, I felt good but I could see how uncoordinated my injured leg has become, She said that our muscles forget how to do things after a while, and just practice will make them remember.

One funny thinks is that as much as I would like to play, It will probably have to be in two weeks from now, as I have finals at school next week!

I hope everyone is doing fine, I will post again after my first game in two weeks  hopefully.

Hi everyone,

Over this last week I have been experiencing some nice changes, a week ago I started doing unassisted heel raises, I can do 6, but I can only reach 20 degrees above the ground. I am getting there I think. Today I was able to run my first mile, I did it in 14 minutes, I guess you could call it jogging. One thing that I am still struggling with is my ROM, I hope this gets better. Other than that the achilles is healing pretty well, no more limpimg while walking, I can walk on my toes while carrying weights, I hope I can be back to light soccer by August.

Good luck to you all!

Hello to all the ATR community,

It has been 12 weeks since my surgery, as I mentioned on previous blogs, I did mine playing soccer on April 3 and underwent surgery 5 days latter.

Over this twelve weeks I have seen how things change so unexpectedly,  I see small progress everyday, but the big milestones come only twice a month, until they come I find encouragement on the everyday small progress. I have been in PT for about 4.5 weeks and although they have switched therapists 3 times already, and I am almost never in contact with them (only with their subordinates who tell me what to do by reading some kind of instruction manual) I have come to make the best of this situation, because I have been able to do 30 reps when whey have asked  for 20 only (since no one is paying attention). This way I am usually able to stretch my visit to 75 minutes.

Things have been going great, except for a small tendon twist (on one of the tendons next to the Achilles) during PT, which kept me one week away from doing heel raises. Two weeks ago I started doing my first assisted one leg toe raise. I have also been hitting my school gym really hard for the last three weeks and I have been able to drop 4 pounds of the 10 I put on. They have some really nice helliptycal machines that feel really good on my tendon.

My third Doctor visit was two days go, it lasted 5 minutes, I laid on my stomach and the Dr. grabbed and moved the tendon, while asking me if I feel any pain. He ordered six more weeks of PT and wants me to see him again after that. I did not asked him what new things I could do, because I knew He would say “Nothing.” I do not mind that, I am doing my on protocol.

My goals for the next weeks are:

-Although I can jog, I want be able to do it with out being afraid.

-Recover my aerobic conditions fully in six weeks, so that when my achilles is fully  recovered I am ready to play competitively again. My anaerobic condition is going  to take longer so I do not even think about it yet.

-Play soccer at 16 weeks, I probably will not be able to sprint yet but I want to be  able to distribute the ball and move around. To do that I have to work a lot on  stretching my tendon.

Thanks everyone for posting, I always find stories that keep me up when I become lazy about recovery. I hope you all are healing well!

Today was my second post surgery visit. Over the last week I have been enjoying some progress. By the third week, I was not using the crutches at all. I have been moving my foot up and down and doing clockwise and counter-clockwise circles with it. This has helped a lot as I have seen my range of motion improving. At the fourth week I have started going to gym, doing push up with out the boot in a very controlled maner, I also did some bench presses and finally I have been using the bicycle increasing my time by 2 minutes every session, this was also done in a very controlled manner. Using the bicycle especially felt really good, I hope I could do it everyday but since I lived 50 minutes from school and right now I do not have any need to go until school starts next week, I only go 3 times a week.

Today at my appointment, the doctor squeezed my calf and looked at my scar, the whole visit lasted 4 minutes. He told me, I can wear two shoes using a wedge on the injured leg. I have been scheduled for PT on this coming tuesday and I am looking forward to it.

For some reason I feel my doctor, although he might be a good surgeon, could do more to help me. I feel he has been getting upset whenever I asked him something, and I do not ask too much. Worse yet today I told him what I could do to help the healing process and he told me “nothing” “your calf will never be the same.”  Fortunately I will be doing therapy in another city since I am moving out, and will only see him again in two months. Finally, I am also excited that I am moving minutes from school, and going to try to go 4 days a week to walk in its swimming pool. we’ll see!

It has been two weeks from the surgery and today April 22 I visited my doctor, they cut the cast and prepared to take out the stitches, they explained that it might hurt. I started breathing deeply to prepare for the pain, but It did not hurt at all. They put 5 tiny bandaids around the wound, asked if I had brought my boot and the wedge for the heel.  Then the specialist asked me if I had any questions before he sends me home. I had already prepared some questions and concerns:

Me: When is my next appoitment?

Dr: In 4 weeks from now.

Me: What can I do to be proactive in my recovery?

Dr: Put weight on your leg as bearable and always using your Boot and heel wedge.

Me: Is the external wound completely healed?

Dr: It is 90% healed

Me: Can I sleep with out the Boot and shower normally?

Dr: You have to wear the Boot 90% of the time and always when sleeping, you can shower but do not soak your leg in water for too long.

Me: I guess I cannot walk in a swimming pool?

Dr: Wait until the bandaids fall off.

Me : That is all, Thank you! And see you in 4 weeks.

In the two weeks between the surgery and this appoitment, I showered an amazing total of two times using an elastic bag to cover the cast. I researched extensively about everything involving this injury, that is how I found out that David Beckham had this same injury on April of 2010 only months before the World Cup. He missed the Wold Cup, which he had been very diligently training for, and still had the perseverance to be back playing for LA Galaxy in October. I also read about the benefits of vegetables and fruits to heal injuries, and became really good moving around the house with crutches.

I have finally come to terms with my injury and started to think what I can get out of this? So far it has been education about my body, how to protect it and keep more healthy than before. I am trying to eat really healthy, snaking on carrots when anxiousness takes me over and consuming lots of fruits rich in vitamin C such as kiwis, since I read that vitamin C might encourage collagen production, which is the main component tendons are made of, and my body might consume it better in the form of fruit than in supplement pills. Eating healthy at the same time helps control my weight. Perhaps the above is not having any physical effect but for sure it is having a positive mental effect, and in this kind of injury the mind plays a very important role in the recovery process.

I was scheduled for surgery 5 days after the injury. On April the eighth I arrived to the Clinic at 2:00 p.m., I was initially interviewed by someone, signed some paperwork about the surgery, and also showed I was bringing someone to drive me back home. At around 2:30 p.m. I was taken to a room and ask to laid on bed, they gave a garment for the surgery which I wore. After 1o minutes of waiting the Anasthesiologist came and asked me if I have eaten something in the last 12 hours, I said “no” and he said ” Good, I had to send someone home yesterday for  eating a piece of french fry” he then proceeded to put an injection in my leg, explaining that it was to avoid pain for the first hours after the surgery. At around 3:00 pm they started to administer the anestishia through my IV, and that is pretty much all I remember until I woke up at around 4:50 pm. To my surprised the surgery went really easy since I have always been really afraid of surgeries. I remember waking up wearing a cast extending from right bellow my left knee all the way to the end of my toes, I was also saying really strange things and no making any sense. I do remenber saying that I was sorry for that and they saying that it is the effect of the anesthesia and is normal.

My surgery consisted of making a 5 inch incision right above the heel, finding the two ends of the ruptured Achilles, cleaning its end (cutting the “frayed” or “bad” parts and making them flat) and reattaching them using some kind of medical thread.

At 5:00 pm my wife drove me home. I was still talking nonsense. I just remembered getting home, eating ten pieces of honey bread, and falling right to sleep for 2 hours. When I woke up at around 7:00 pm I was still feeling really dizzy. I elelvated my foot on some pillows and laid on the couch having some ice packs around my cast. I had some pain medicine and went to sleep around 10:00 pm, I felt no pain the whole night and slept like a baby.

The next day at around noon and even though I was taking the pain medicine, I started feeling a very intense pain around the incision. From a scale from 1-10, 10 being the worse, I put the moment of the injury at 5, and the pain post injury at 8. I would keep taking my pain medicine , and the horrible pain would persist for the next 48 hours and decrease exponentially from there. I cannot imagine how the first night would have been if I would not have had special anesthesia in my leg. To help with pain they also gave me a device that would send electric pulses through my leg and that really helped alleviate it.

I was schedule an appointment for two week post surgery.

As I mentioned on my first post the injury was on sunday. By monday my wife suggested that I should see a doctor really soon, we went to an Urgent Care Clinic and they told us that a doctor could see as immediately. The Doctor looked at my leg and touched the area where the Achilles was supposed to be and showed me a hole taking that place. He asked me to lay on my stomach, having both feet off the bed. He then squeezed my calf and noticed that the left foot would not respond to it, while the right foot would move from side to side. He asked me to sit up and explain that I will most likely need surgery but that I should come tomorrow and see the specialist, meanwhile I was going to wear a cast.

The next day I saw the specialist who did the same test (squeezing my calves) and confirmed I would need surgery. The surgery was scheduled for Friday April the eighth, five days after the injury. I left the clinic wearing a boot and very scared about the prospect of the first surgery in my life. I was so scared that I forgot about the injury itself. While wating for the surgery and knowing what was ahead of me, I began to to do some planning of how I was going to move around the house, take care of my son, attend to school and just how my life was going to change from now on.

By Friday, the day of the surgery, I was doing a lot better going up and down the stairs, using the crutches, and had a medical withdraw from school, which was easy to petition once the adviser saw me on crutches and understood the seriousness of the injury. I was saying “Adios” to soccer for the rest of my life I felt.

About a month ago I ruptured my Achilles tendon while playing soccer. I am left footed and 90 % of the time I lead the ball with my left foot and use the right for impulse. The injury happen when I tried to lead the ball with my right foot and use the left one for impulse. I still remembered that right when it happen I heard a pop, fell down and even yield a “heyyyyyyyyyyyyyy” thinking that someone had kicked me really hard from behind, I turned around a look around me and see none, the game was stopped and people came around me, I heard someone saying “He probably tore his Achilles” I never heard of such injury and I thought I could just go out for some minutes and then returned and play easy, But when I stood up I could not put any way on my left foot so I leave the field hooping on my right foot. Once off the field I look at my leg and half of it was really swollen and when I compared to my other leg I notice a scary difference, the right foot had an very noticeable Achilles while the left one had nothing.

That morning when I got home, I started doing research on the internet about what happen to me, still thinking I was going to be playing in two weeks or so. Achilles tendon ruptured are so easy to figure out because It seems that everyone experience the same: The snap sound, the feeling of being hit by something on that area, and the sudden fall. Even when I was sure that i had rupted my Achilles tendon I still had hopes that the doctor may say that It was only a small tear, but who was I fooling? I was on road to my first surgery ever.

Why It happened? I do not know! I try to think the soccer field had a hole and that upon putting my foot on it, it over stretched the tendon, but most likely that is not the answer. I used to train really hard for soccer and was very involved in  taking care of myself, when the injury happened I had been out of training for about 6 months and eating unhealthy and trying to play with the same intensity I would when I was training 5 days a week. To make matters worse I remembered playing the day before the injury and feeling very sore on the areas around the Achilles tendon. Although I may have found a possible explanation that satisfies me, for the first week after the injury I did not in anyway come to terms with this injury.

By the way: The injury happened on Sunday April the fourth on a beautiful sunny, 70 degrees morning.