Achilles Explosion

As I mentioned earlier, I had surgery to lengthen my Achilles tendon this past January.  That kept me off of my feet for about seven weeks.  Finally, when it was all healed, I took the boot off.  I literally had to learn to walk again.  Since the tendon was lengthened, my foot literally hung off my leg at a different angle.  When I walked, it felt like I was walking downhill with one foot.  I looked like a 270 pound toddler, walking with my arms flailing about for balance, grabbing onto furniture for support.

A few days after I got the boot off, I was woken up at 2AM by a blizzard.  I could hear the wind howling outside.  But more than that, I could hear my windmill whizzing in the high wind.  There is always a chance of burning out the windmill generator, and, since we live off grid and depend on wind and solar power, I did not want to be without a windmill.  I slipped on my house shoes and ran outside.  I was pelted with sheets of wind-driven snow.  There were already a couple of inches on the ground.  It took me a second to grab the cord that was flapping in the gale.  Finally, I grasped it and pulled, locking down the windmill.  

When I turned back to the house, I slipped on the slick steps.  I didn't fall, and I didn't trip.  My foot merely slid off of the step, and I stumbled just a bit.  I went and crawled back into bed, and the throbbing started in the back of my leg.  I told my wife that I thought I might have done something to my leg.  Sure enough, purple bruises starting making their way up from my ankle all the way up to my thigh.

I called my podiatrist.  He said that he was sure that I ruptured my tendon and set an appointment.  A week, or so, later, he sent me in for an MRI.  Sure enough, there was a rupture in the tendon.  I was surprised.  I didn’t come down on my foot that hard.  How could it rupture?

I consulted with my doctor.  It was going to require some major surgery to repair it, and another eight weeks recovery.  I groaned.  When was I ever going to be able to walk?  When would I ever be able to go on the walkabout that I was planning?  This seemed to be taking forever!  Not to mention that I still needed to get the Achilles tendon procedure done on the other leg, the right leg.

One good thing did emerge from my visit to the doctor.  I told him about my goal once I start walking, about the whole “Without Purse Or Scrip” project.  Since my doctor is LDS, he knew what I was talking about.  I mentioned to him that I knew of a guy in Show Low, AZ who had done his thesis on the Los Angeles mission, which was the LAST mission in the LDS Church to send out its missionaries without purse or scrip.  (Ogden Kraut, who was a famed author in the fundamentalist Mormon community as well as a polygamist, was a part of this mission.)  For my research, I desperately wanted to get a hold of this thesis, and to get a hold of the author, whom I met on one occasion years ago.  But I had no clue how to get a hold of him.  To my amazement, my doctor knew this guy and gave me his cell number.  (I have yet to call him.)

So the morning came for my surgery.  I had been fasting since midnight the day before.  The nurse came in and took my glucose reading, which was high.  Then the anesthesiologist came in and had a talk about my vitals.  Not only was my glucose high, but so was my blood pressure and my heart rate.  My heart rate was 130.  He decided to do an EKG.

He was almost smug when he came and said to me, “You’ve had a heart attack in the last six months.”

I felt like I was struck by a bus.  A heart attack??  How was this possible?

The short of it was – he was refusing to administer anesthesia to me because of my vitals and sent me to the ER.  The doctor in the ER took another EKG and told me not to worry; they had no previous EKG to compare it to.  So how could they really know?

Over the course of the next couple of weeks, they sent me to a cardiologist who ran a series of tests on me – including a chemical stress test (OMG, I thought I would die!), an angiogram, and radiation test.  The results – my heart was fine.

I was bewildered.  I asked him about all the tests that had precipitated all of this concern.

“False positives,” he said calmly.

There had been a few terrifying moments there.  While they were strapping me down for the angiogram, they told me that if they discovered an abnormality in my heart, they wouldn’t even wake me up.  They would wheel me right into heart surgery.  As the anesthesia pulled me into blackness, there was a part of me that helplessly wondered if I would even wake up.

So it was a tremendous relief to find that my heart was healthy.  This enabled me to go into surgery.  I brought my glucose and blood pressure under control.  The whole reason that my heart rate had been so elevated was because I was dehydrated.  It had taken four bags of IV fluids to bring my heart rate down.  (Man, did I have to pee afterwards!)

So they rolled me into surgery to repair my tendon.  While under the fog of propofol, the anesthesiologist, who was sitting in a chair by my head, bored to tears, took a snapshot of my leg filleted open.  He showed it to me on his phone while I lay on the table.  It was a bloody mess.  The drugs made the experience vaguely impersonal to me.

“Cool!”  I grinned.  “Can you send that to me?”

“Actually, he stammered, “I wasn’t even supposed to take that.”

The podiatrist came out to see me afterwards.  He said that – in his nearly 20 years of podiatry – he had never seen an Achilles tendon rupture as bad as mine.  It had literally exploded.  It was like a sports injury.  Normally, when you do an Achilles tendon repair, you make a small incision behind the foot, above the heel.  He had to cut halfway up my leg.  My tendon had ruptured into five pieces.  It was like putting a jigsaw puzzle back together.  To this day, I still don’t know how a small stumble on an icy step created such an injury.

He sent me home with a cast on my leg and an oxycodone prescription.

In my next entry, I will talk about my healing process…