Writing is 90% perspiration, 10% inspiration

Here is the screw they took out next to a nickel for comparison.

Yesterday I had the long awaited surgery and finally got “un-screwed” by the Army. The procedure was relatively easy but with a slight complication. The doc said the screw was definitely backing out. That caused it to slightly tear the tendon on the outside of the foot. So besides taking the screw out she also had to repair the tendon.

The recovery is going so easy it’s hard to imagine I even had surgery. As you can see below the wrap is much less intense than last year. And with keeping up on my Percocet regiment I haven’t had any significant pain.

Actually, everything feels so eerily the same it’s almost as if I’ve been transplanted back to last year and nothing has happened in between!

Brittany has been amazing at taking care of me, too. She’s been on top of my meds schedule, preparing my ice packs, and making me food and, most importantly, coffee!

Everything has screwed up my sleep schedule a bit. Coming from the guy who falls asleep whenever I site in one place for too long, taking two Percocet last night actually had me up until about 2 a.m.

Here is a comparison between my surgery last year and how the recovery looks thus far.

I’ll be in this post-surgical wrap and on crutches until my follow up appointment on March 2nd. More than likely the doc will take out the stitches then and put me in a boot (best case scenario). I should be walking in that boot for a few weeks before moving to normal shoe walking. However it will probably be some time before I do anything dynamic. I imagine I’ll be doing physical therapy a few times a week until we leave for the deployment.

Speaking of, the doc doesn’t see a reason for this to delay my deployment. I won’t be in as good of shape as I’d like to be, but you gotta make do with what you got.

Here you can see where the ridiculously large screw head was protruding out the side of my foot.

Popularity: 87% [?]

Tuesday I’ll finally be getting “un-screwed” by the Army, almost exactly one year after getting “screwed” by the Army (and yes, I just linked to my own blog, so I’m pretty sure that elevates my blog status out of the noob phase).

In July after my initial recovery I started having pain in my foot. It wasn’t too bad at first, and I chalked it up to standard recovery pains. I thought I was coming back to running and exercise at a decent pace but who knows. I was able to run through the pain for about a month before deciding the pain was more than normal recovery pain.

I went to our unit physician and he said it was probably plantar fasciitis. Even though I didn’t fit the usual bill for a PF patient (over 40, over weight, extreme runner) it was probably a complication of my recovery. After taking his advice and not running for a month, the pain still hadn’t significantly subsided.

It took a full month to get an appointment with a podiatrist. The diagnosis was plantar fasciitis, but that wasn’t all. She said I had another broken bone in my foot, and that the screw put in last year was backing itself out. The other broken bone is a small circular bone under the first joint of my big toe. She seemed to think this bone broke in the last few months, but I think it broke around the same time as my original break and went undiagnosed (the bone is barely visible on an x-ray, and my first doctor was only a general orthopedic, not a podiatrist).

Ironically that broken bone didn’t cause me any pain. But that bone is what the plantar fascia tendon attaches to and dissipates 130 percent of your body weight while walking. So like a stretched rubber band that starts to tear at its stress points, my plantar fascia was being pulled wrong because of that small broken bone.

Further irony arose in my treatment options. The plantar fascia is treated with anti inflammatory medication, stretching, physical therapy and wearing a night splint. The screw needed to be surgically removed. The stretching and physical therapy couldn’t take place during and after surgical recovery. So, both had to be treated independently. At the time the plantar fasciitis pain in my heel was ten times the hardware pain, and the screw doesn’t necessarily have to be removed. I opted to try the heel treatments first and see if that would take care of the problem.

Oh, she also said one of my legs was shorter than the other and that, combined with my scoliosis, was probably affecting the way I walk and the heel pain. Therefore the total prognosis became anti-inflammatory drugs, physical therapy, wearing a night splint, an MRI to measure the length of my legs, custom boot inserts, and chiropractor treatments.

FML. I’m a walking shit show.

After a month of that craziness the pain in my heel went down significantly. That, however, revealed how much more the screw problem was affecting me. So at my follow up I talked to my podiatrist about surgery.

That was the first week of December. Surgery was finally scheduled last week for February 23rd.

Three cheers for government health care!

Anyway, this surgery is expected to be much less invasive than getting the screw put in. I’ll only be on crutches for a week or so, and then some time in a walking boot. All in all I should walk normally in one month. Time before running again is TBD.

I’ll be ready to go for Afghanistan, but I definitely won’t be as physically ready as I thought I would be when I first envisioned deploying. Other than that I’m hoping for the best and I’ll be enjoying my 30 days of convalescent leave to the fullest — I think I’ve deserved it.

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Knowledge, learning new things, is like heroin. Or at least as close to a heroin addiction as I can extrapolate from movies and pop culture. Gaining knowledge makes the hairs on the back of my neck and arms stand up. It’s like my soul trying to leap out of my body; like my brain refusing to wait for my physical body to keep up with chasing the answers to all the world’s problems.

Then there’s the Army — the antithesis of knowledge and unbridled progress. In the modern world of light speed communication and a war based on unpredictability and chaos, it seems that protocol is a road block set up by the enemy’s double agents to undermine ourselves from within.

Not much going on besides feeling under-utilized for my talents and ambitions. Some may need 18 months to be a second lieutenant, but I don’t think I do. Hell, some need 36 months. I’d like to think I evolve in my new environments faster than most. I grow to the size of the pond I’m thrown in to. But lately I feel like I’m being asked to shrink. Going home at the end of a day and being able to look back and confidently conclude that I accomplished absolutely nothing feels akin to slitting my own wrist. I’m huffing the noxious fumes of inefficiency to purposefully retard my performance to fill the spot of a warm body. And it’s only been 10 months!

Now it seems every empty moment I get is used to wistfully dream of future challenges.

“It’ll be better when I make captain,” I tell myself. Or, “It’ll be better when I’m in a different battalion/branch/etc.”

The happiest I get is when I think of where I could be in ten years. Do most people have a ten year plan? I don’t know. But it seems the ten-year mark is my short term goal lately. Reading books and the news about the strategy our generals have for the war, and reading about the grand-scale problems that face the middle east regions we’re involved in right now, captures my imagination and stokes my intellectual curiosity. Being required to regurgitate information in differing forms of PowerPoint does not. After almost a year in an active duty unit, almost zero professional development. I actually feel much less motivated and much less utilized than when I was a cadet.

When left unconstrained I can see myself in graduate school and writing stories and papers for professional publications. Or at least going out every day and trying to make something happen. I dream of the day I may end up in law school and push my intellectual capacity past the red line. Maybe I could work for a non-profit agency that works on international security policy issues that can pressure corrupt and oppressive regimes into modernity. Maybe I could consult members of Congress on energy policies that would solidify the United States as the shining beacon of innovation and leadership in the next century. Maybe I could clean up Illinois politics?

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“Thou Shalt not shop at the commissary after work on a Monday, especially those following a four-day weekend”

Broke the cardinal commandment of Army life today. The self checkout, 25-items or less line was a 20 minutes wait. Long lines make for contemplative moments. The most contemplative lately being “should I stay in this crazy Army world?”

There is much yet to be seen. But one thing seems for certain: Simplicity follows Civilian…ity.

The world around me gets more bitter with ever drop in the mercury and day closer to the deployment. I maintain that I’m an optimist, but people make it reeeeeeeeeally hard some times.

Everyone knows the Army is on the brink of crisis mode between two wars. One of the large challenges that gets frequently brought up is the lack of, and decline in, quality officers in the officer corps. So even though I’m not from a military background, and even though I became an officer so that I could do my part for the nation in her time of greatest need, why do I feel bad thinking about getting out of the Army when my contract is up? If I was unaware that the officer corps was hurting, or if I thought I couldn’t contribute in a positive way, would I feel less guilty?

Why would I even feel guilty just thinking about leaving the Army once my initial commitment comes to pass?

That, ladies and gentlemen, is called duty. And she is a coy mistress.

There is a looming cloud that darkens the shadow cast by my stature, making me look fitfully around every corner. If one man stands by and lets evil take place, is he not guilty? If I’m an officer capable of contributing to the solution, and not willing to fix it, do I become part of the problem? The Army needs smart, ambitious people to lead the Army through one of her darkest hours. People who could otherwise hang up their boots for six-figure paychecks that don’t involve weeks and years away from their families and running/rucking miles in freezing/blistering temperatures.

Then again, the Army needs advocates in the “civilian sector,” too. People who were insiders, know what makes the culture tick, and can help bring about necessary change.
I also think it may be a self fulfilling prophecy to do an internal review on personnel quality during a time of war, when the armed forces are built to be torn down during a conflict.

So, should we disregard our initial intentions for honorable, yet brief, service and at last fully commit to the greater good of the institution that invested so much in us for its own future, therefore possibly giving up part of our own future we thought would be waiting on the other side?

Exactly. Don’t go to the commissary after work.

Popularity: 73% [?]