Ankle surgery and the start of healing

On Thursday, August 15th, Craig and I headed to the Orthopaedic Hospital of Wisconsin in Glendale for a surgery I scheduled way back in February. 

My initial injury occurred when I fractured a bone on the medial side of my left ankle while playing volleyball in my parents' yard back in 2007. I didn't have health insurance at the time, so I listened to my family and friends and assumed it was "just a sprain" and never got an X-ray. 

My ankle continued to give out on me laterally, so I dealt with the pain, swelling, and bruising. I went through two or three rounds of physical therapy and tried my best to focus on those exercises at the gym. I never felt stable on my ankle and dealt with a lot of pain throughout the years. 

Last December, my ankle gave out on me pretty badly and I had so much pain from that injury, so I finally decided to do something about it and see an orthopaedic surgeon in the new year. 

While my condition wasn't as bad as others the doc had seen, I decided to have the Broström operation this summer with the hope of never turning my ankle out again.

Our experience at the hospital was wonderful, which is exactly what one needs when going in for a major surgery like this one. We got there early and met with various nurses, the physical therapist, the anesthesiologist, and my surgeon. 

The surgery took about an hour and all went well. The doctor made an incision and tightened the ATFL (anterior talofibular ligament). My ankle is now very stiff and physical therapy will help get it flexible again. 

My cast is huge and heavy. As far as I understood from what everyone said at the hospital, my doctor made this cast up himself and created his own way to protect my foot. 

The first 24 hours were pretty good. I felt great and wasn't in a ton of pain (because the local anesthetic they did on my foot probably hadn't worn off yet). I just rested a lot and let Craig take care of me. Tanzi has been resting on me and is a comforting "nurse" to have around.

I received some gorgeous flowers from my work and that cheered me up yesterday!

I've been trying to eat small and somewhat healthy meals. I had Craig enhance a Trader Joe's pizza by adding spinach and zucchini to it.

I was getting a bit stir crazy yesterday and went outside for some sun. We are lucky enough to live in a ranch house, but there are two bigger steps that I have to hop up to get inside. Those two steps really hurt my foot and I experienced intense pain after those movements. My foot moved too much as I hopped forward and there was really no way around that movement. I guess I won't be going outside for a while or I may have to sit down on the steps to get back inside. I was pretty down in the dumps last night and was crying from the pain.

I am feeling a little better today and it's probably because I have been resting and letting the way I feel dictate what I do. We've subscribed to free months with Amazon Prime and Netflix, so we started watching Breaking Bad this morning and I've been addicted to House Hunters International. It's sort of hard for me to concentrate and read, but I am sure that will get easier to do once I am on less pain pills.

I have three weeks off of work from this point on, so I am sure that will be a good amount of time to heal before I get back in the office. Being on crutches and dependent on others is not fun though!

Well, that's all for now and I will continue to keep you posted on my progress.