tategregory

It’s been a long nine days since my surgery and I’m now looking forward to my two week follow-up. I have no pain or soreness other than the rush of blood every time i stand up. The most surprising thing to me about recovering from this is how physically and mentally exhausted i get from doing any simple task.  Everything I do involves so much focus and concentration to make sure i don’t put my injured leg and crutching around is a constant workout.

Working all five days this week was tough and I came home completely exhausted every day.  Fortunately, campus security has been lenient in allowing me to park in the 15 minute parking spots right outside my office which has been a lifesaver.  I’m getting pretty good on crutches although I had two scares at work this week.  Once my crutches got caught on some equipment as I was turning around and I started to fall backwards and instinctively put weight on my bad leg.  Another time I slipped when I reached the top of a staircase and put my bad leg down to keep from falling forward.  Both incidents scared the hell out of me but there was no pain or any increased soreness afterward so I’m assuming I didn’t screw anything up.

I managed to draw quite a few stares the other day at the grocery store.  I was craving some ice cream so I went to the freezer aisle, grabbed some reese’s peanut butter cup ice cream and then realized I had no pockets large enough to carry it up to the register.  I thought about my conundrum for a minute then decided to resort to what an eight year old with his hands full would do.  I made a pouch with my t-shirt and held it up with my teeth exposing just about my entire torso as I crutched my way to the register.

Yesterday was day 4 since my surgery and definitely had my most productive day yet.  After dragging myself off the couch this morning, I drove 15 agonizing minutes to work.  This was definitely the hardest part of my day.  It felt like my left hip flexor was going to cramp up the entire drive from not being able to rest my foot.  Today i’m going to put a pillow on the floor of the car so i can rest my foot.  I went through the whole morning with no issues then got a workout in at lunch.  Weight lifting is the staple of my daily routine so it felt great to do something active to take my mind off my ATR.  I did a light upper body lift consisting of bench press (feet elevated), plate loaded chest press, lat pulldowns, band work for my shoulders and some core.  The only negative about working out was keeping my left leg elevated during every exercise leading to incredible soreness of my left hip flexor and lower back today.

I popped a pain pill (i didn’t want to take any yesterday but I was hurting pretty bad after being up and moving around for an hour working out) after lunch and just kind of went about my business in the afternoon until it was time to go home.  When i got home I was able to undress and get in my lawn chair for a shower by myself…i still can’t put my plastic shower cast cover on by myself so i had to get help with that.  Other than that i can at least shower independently now.

I can feel that the swelling around my achilles is starting to go down as there’s less pressure from the cast and i can wiggle my foot around a little more.  I can also voluntarily control my calf muscle a little which is nice, although I feel a pinch in the achilles whenever i do it.

I just had my surgery on Thursday and will be back at work tomorrow.  I guess I got really lucky as pain hasn’t been bad at all and I plan on completely going off my meds tomorrow.  Would there be any risk at all as far lifting weights (light, upper body only) tomorrow?  My surgeon told me I was clear to do whatever I wanted provided I could tolerate the pain as long as I didn’t put any weight on the repaired leg.

This is my first post, obviously, and i wanted to introduce myself to the community.  I ruptured my left Achilles tendon this past Monday night playing basketball and had surgery on Thursday.  So far the pain hasn’t been bad, and I’ve taken significantly less meds that what i was prescribed.  The toughest thing for me to overcome these first three days has been boredom and lack of independence.