Pop goes the achilles

Here’s the summary (spoiler alert): I had the surgery, yesterday.  Happy birthday to me.

Here’s the appropriate Zander Emoti-con for this post:

I went in to my appointment and picked up a Toronto Life magazine in the waiting room.  I found this article in it: Super-Bugged. (Don’t know how long the link will be active.)  Just the information you want when you’re in a hospital!  It sounds horrific.

I didn’t have to wait too long.  A lady took me to the same room I was in before to get my cast, and started asking me questions that I didn’t know the answer too.  Like: “Are you having surgery?”.  This ended up being a bit of a theme for the day.  She considered taking the cast off or leaving it on, decided to leave it on, left, then came back to take it off.  She rightly said that the Dr. couldn’t examine me with it on, and she was pretty sure that the first thing he would say is get the cast off.  I wanted the thing off so I could see what things looked like.  She asked me if Archie put the cast on.  Wait!  Could Archie be The Guy?  I asked if Archie was a Dr., and she said that he is an “Ortho Tech”.  So at least he wasn’t the janitor.

Here’s the cast:

Cast

She cut the front of the cast off and told me not to move my foot - keep my toes pointed down.  She left and while I was waiting I did my own little Thompson test, comparing my right and left feet.  I was hoping there would be some movement since it was supposed to be a partial tear and it had two weeks to start healing.  I squeezed my calf and . . . nothing.  Damn.  I kept trying, like going back to the fridge to see if some new food has magically appeared.  I did get it to move, but it was just the skin pulling, nothing else.  There were a bunch of Air Cast boxes stored in the room, and I was really hoping that I would be leaving with one but I knew that wasn’t going to happen.

Leg

I was surprised at the amount of blood still in my foot.  I thought it would have been gone by now, two weeks after the injury.  You can see the indentation in the back of my leg, just above the heel where the tear was.  I couldn’t resist doing a little prodding myself, and moving my foot a little bit.  It felt tight and hurt a bit when I flexed my foot.

Finally I meet Dr. H.  He asks all the same old questions, and I give all the same answers.  Then he gets on to looking at my leg.  He has me roll onto my stomach and starts the squeezing and poking.  I can feel his fingers go pretty far in at the tear - still no tendon there.  He has me take the shoe and sock off of my right foot to compare.  He has me push against his hand with my left foot and it seems like I’m able to exert a fair amount of force, but the whole time I’m sure I’m going to feel another pop.  We do the same on the right side, and he’s really leaning down on my foot with most of his weight.  Then he says to push again with the right, but with my toes curled up.  Again I hold most of his weight.  Now the left foot, with toes curled.  My foot gives way a little.  ”Push!” he says.  I push, but he pushes harder and my foot flexes.

“OWWW!”

“Sorry”, he says.  ”Yeah, that’s not a partial tear, it’s complete.  The ultrasound was wrong.  It’s your toe flexors that are making your foot move, not your achilles.”

Shit.  Archie was right.

Dr. H. outlines the options: surgery or conservative.  When he tells me that the re-rupture rate for conservative is 30 to 40% I know that he’s definitely pro-surgery.  I tell him that I’ve seen studies that say the conservative method is more successful than that, but he says that they don’t have the same orthotics that they probably used in the studies.  He goes on to say that he’s treated about 50 ATR’s, only 2 of which went conservative.  They were successful, but he says they were low-demand people, and all of his surgeries have been successful.  He can do the surgery tonight, but he has to know soon.

Damn, damn, damn.  I told him that if this would have been last week I would have said “OK, surgery, let’s go!”, but I’m not excited about starting over.  I ask a few more questions and hum and haw.  He doesn’t want to wait for me to decide - he says he’ll give me a couple minutes and come back.  I’m pissed.  I tell him “Alright, screw it, let’s do the surgery”.  He says OK and that he has to make some calls to set it up and I don’t see him again until that evening.

Archie comes in with a sympathetic smile.  He has me fill in a bunch of forms, somewhat haphazardly - some are signed, some aren’t.  My name is printed on some, not others.  He skips some forms, then changes his mind and has me do them.  Seems like the biggest concern are the form releasing the hospital of responsibility for a variety of things.  He leaves, comes back for one more form and has a bunch of stickers with my name on them to put on the forms where my name should be printed.  Surgery is set for 6:00 (my appt was 12:15, and it’s about 1:30 now).  He puts the cast back on me and holds it together with some tensors.  He says I should go to the day surgery area now to pre-register and get some information.

I go and register and the lady complains about all the stickers on the forms and missing signatures.  Asks me questions I can’t answer, sends me over to another area.  The nurse there turns out to be my friends’ aunt.  She recognized the name of my street on the form - we had met at one of my friend’s wedding in the summer.  It was nice to have a friendly and somewhat familiar face there because I was quickly going to a dark place.

I was told to come back at 5:45 because they close the desk / intake area at 6:00.  I came home and called my mom to make sure she would be here in time to take me to the hospital.  Then I called my wife.  My mom and brother arrived and I explained the situation, and outlined a few jobs that I was hoping they could do while they were at the house.  Then I told them that I was just going to go play my videogame for a while because I just didn’t want to think about anything.  About 4:00 I went upstairs and scrubbed my leg but then I put it back in the same dirty old cast, so who knows if that helped anything.  My hand slipped on the wall of the tub and I ended up putting some weight on my foot - OWWW again.

Tired - I’ll have to continue with the surgery story tomorrow.

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