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.

Popularity: 98% [?]