Ankle Trouble

Over the past ten, twenty, thirty years, I can't tell you how many times I have rolled my ankle in various sports and activities.  What I can say is that apparently folding laundry is the most dangerous sport of them all!  This saga started several months ago where I was up in our bedroom folding laundry and caught a bit of the carpet coming around our bed corner and completely rolled my ankle.  I knew I had hurt it, but it didn't behave as most rolled ankles had.  It never really swelled up and within a few days I was mostly back to action.  However, there was something about it that felt loose and it was very evident on my long runs that I was getting some weird pain.  A few weeks later I went in to see Dr. Ocel and he took about 15 seconds diagnosing the issue that we later confirmed with an Xray and an MRI...I had torn two of the tendons in my ankle and also took a small chunk off of the bone.  This all led to an inopportune time for a surgery to have everything repaired.

The first stage was the surgery, followed by two weeks in this above wrap and fully being non-weight bearing.  I spent almost the entire two weeks living on this couch.  I think the pain in my hips and back were far worse than the ankle pain.  It was a brutal experience.

After two weeks (to let the swelling go down), I headed back into the office to move from the soft wrap into a cast.  This was the first look I was able to get at my ankle.  They had two holes in front to clean out the join and remove the bone and a long incision up the outside of the ankle to perform the Brostrom procedure for the ligament repair.

 Here is the next stage, at least with this cast (though still non-weight bearing for two weeks with the cast) I feel a bit more sturdy and led to some better sleep as I moved back into our bed.