Ligaments, tendons & muscles, OH MY!

I went in to see my regular MD this morning about my ankle. Someone I actually trust. My pain level is still very high and I can't put any weight on my foot. I continue to have twitching and spasms in my ankle but they're not waking me up in the middle of the night like they were. My skin is starting to feel strange from the stretching caused by swelling. He looked at my X-rays and confirmed I don't have a fracture (which is still hard for me to fathom). We then discussed exactly what a sprain is.


He described it as a tearing, ripping of the ligaments, tendons and muscles around the bone. This sprain has also gone up to the ligaments between my tibia and fibula bones in my lower leg. Yup, I did it up pretty darn good. I asked him how these ligaments, tendons and muscles heal. He said by scar tissue. The reason this one is so bad is because there wasn't enough scar tissue yet, from my sprain in May. So when I rolled it this time, everything basically "blew up." Nice! I did hear a couple "pops" when it happened.


What now? It's going to be a loooong, slooooow recovery.

I won't be able to put weight on it for at least a couple more weeks. I need to elevate it when I can. He referred me to an orthopedist that specializes in ankles. I see him on Monday.


Tomorrow will be a week since the injury and here's the foot:


I am putting these pictures of my foot here so I can look back on them when I want to see my progress.


Right now, the thought of running down a trail scares the crap out of me. The initial pain I felt when it happened is still so fresh in my mind. I can't even imagine doing it again. I know this feeling will go away. However, I'm seriously considering a triathlon now, kind of mix things up for a while. Swimming and biking are beginning to interest me a little bit more.

My employer (REI) has been so great to me. The schedule comes out two weeks ahead of time and most employees are trained to work in certain departments only. Some (me included) are trained to work in more than one area. My main department is clothing/footwear. I'm also trained to work customer service/cashier. When I work in clothing/footwear, I am constantly walking around on a cement floor and making a monkey out of myself in the shoe warehouse, climbing shelves to retrieve shoes for customers. Since I'm limited to what I can do for the next two weeks, my supervisor (along with some extremely generous co-workers) has been able to arrange it so I will be working customer service, even though the schedule has me working clothing shifts the next two weeks. I was very touched that they would get together and make that happen for me. Have I told you how lucky I feel to work there?

HSE Lori picked up Boomer last night and took him to the creek trail for a run. That was so nice of her. Evidently Boomer thanked Lori by finding every goldfish cracker her children had dropped under or behind the seats in her car and "took care of them" for her. ;)

Until later.............