Surgery-Day
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.