How I Got My Big Hurt Left Foot

In March 2011, I was running barefoot on the beach in St. Lucia. Mind you, I found out later it's dangerous to run barefoot in the sand, especially if you're of the over-50 variety, which I most definitely am. Plus, and I believe this with all my heart, if man were meant to still be running, there'd still be a saber tooth tiger about 10 feet behind him as the reason why.

So I ran down this beautiful beach, to actually help someone out. See, there was this group of kiteboarders and one guy's wife had hung up on a reef, so he sailed in to ask me to alert the rescue boat people about 200 yards away. Why HE didn't just sail there to do it still baffles me, and dude, if you're reading this, you owe me an apology and an uninjured left foot.

So I huff and puff my way down the beach and find out the rescue boat left about five minutes ago, meaning my huffing and puffing was in vain. Nice. So now I'm standing there, panting heavily (I was smoking then, have since quit), and suddenly feel agonizing pain in my left achille's. Not unusual, I've been athletic all my life and things hurt from time to time and to be honest I can't think of a single part of my body I HAVEN'T hurt over the years, save for maybe my ear lobes. So I don't think much of it, I just limp around the rest of the day, but that night, chasing and missing a connection through MIA - which stands for Massively Incomprehensible Airline by the way - I pulled it pretty good again, this time to the point of wondering how badly I had hurt it.

Very, it turns out. I went to my ortho guy when I got home (ok, after a few weeks of playing hockey and ignoring the pain), and it was tore up, not ruptured, but pretty screwed up and on the verge of rupturing. So he puts me in a big plastic Aircast boot for six weeks and by five weeks, the foot feels way better - but I develop a screaming case of sciatica from walking unevenly in a big honking plastic boot. So now I can walk on my left foot OK, but my spine's feeling like someone plugged a live wire up my ass and cranked it up high. Pain like you cannot believe.

So a couple months of therapy for THAT, and I'm all better, foot's great, back's great, so I decide to go for a bike ride. Which isn't bad. What IS bad? I decide to do a little Evel Kinevel jump on a boat dock in Marion and push hard off my left foot - instantly rupturing the tendon, which I'd started to do months earlier and now, judging from the searing pain in the back of my leg, is pretty much a done deal.

Weird thing about Achille's ruptures. I'd always heard when you pop one, it snakes up the back of your leg like a window shade. Honestly. And there's pain, incredible pain and your foot is just dangling, uselessly. But not mine. It hurt, hurt like hell, but only for a couple days. I finally went to my local doc who said yup, it's ruptured and he was amazed I could still walk on it. And that WAS amazing, I walked for months, albeit with a limp, but a completely ruptured Achille's. WHen I finally got to see Dr. DiGiovanni in Rhode Island, he said there are four tendons down there doing tendon stuff and the other three were holding me together. He said I could leave it like that forever but wouldn't have the functionality of before, no sports, be walking funny forever, so I opted for surgery a couple months later.

And that's what happened two days ago, which I'll get to in the next post. No idea if anyone will read this stuff but since I've nothing to do but nothing for a couple weeks, it's reasonably good therapy and could possibly keep me from gaining 150 pounds over the next 14 days. Hopefully.