2011: An Ankle Odyssey

As of today it's been just about exactly one month since my ankle surgery and four months since the original injury. Long story short: the orthopedist put me in a boot for a month to see if that fixed me without surgery, but it didn't, so I had surgery to fix the teeny tear in my tendon.

But that wasn't all that was fixed. I think I've mentioned weird ankle pain when running or walking before; I can remember walking home from elementary school and pain shooting up my right ankle and not getting better until I sat down for a while. I've never had this sort of pain in my left ankle, only my right - which, coincidentally, was also the ankle I sprained back in April.

The surgeon made some vague reference to some kind of muscle issue discovered (and fixed) during surgery, and he clarified it when I went back for my first post-op appointment ten days later. The peroneal brevis muscle in your calf is supposed to end at your upper ankle, about where the top of a bobby sock would be. Mine extended all the way down and wrapped around the bottom of the ankle bone. The little space that runs behind the ankle bone really doesn't have much room: just enough for the two tendons that go through there. With the muscle there too, it means that whenever I worked it (like running or walking), it would expand with blood and thus cause pain and inflammation and probably wasn't helping the torn tendon any either. So he cut the extra muscle away to fix the problem. If I hadn't busted up my ankle, this lifelong issue may never have been spotted.

In short, I was too beefy for my own good.

I'm still in a walking boot for a couple more weeks, and have thus far have not been assigned physical therapy. Once I can walk normally again I'll start looking into another gym. My "big news" (which would have entailed moving halfway across the country) ended up falling through, so I'm staying in this area for the foreseeable future.

Which is fine. I just miss going to the gym. The other day I picked up the novel I'd been reading on the exercise bike and finally finished it. It felt weird to read it while lying in bed, but I knew if I didn't pick it back up I'd have to start over from the beginning, and I didn't want to do that. Oh well; I'll start another book when I finally get back into regular gym visits.