Back to blogging

This is going to be a vaguely random blog post.

About a month ago, I'd transitioned off Medifast. I was eating more food, and more types of food, exercising a lot more, and I even started playing tennis again. I was bouncing around between 259-265 pounds, which I felt was pretty good considering I doubled my calorie intake and started eating carbs again.

Well, last week I was playing tennis, and while running for a shot, I felt a snapping in my right heel, and i hit the ground hard. Lying on the court, looking up at the lights, my foot hurt pretty bad, and I was sure I'd just ruptured my Achilles tendon. I got helped up by the class and went to the bench and iced it.

A while later, my wife came to get me, and brought crutches. I was able to go to my podiatrist the next day and he took a look at it. He confirmed it wasn't good, and sent me to get an MRI.

Now, Id been seeing this podiatrist because I have a vicious bone spur on the back of my right heel. I had an even worse one on my left heel, that I had surgically removed about 5 years ago. This surgery sucked, and I wasn't really interested in repeating it. However, my right heel was getting worse and worse, and I had finally decided to get surgery in January and just get it dealt with.

However, before doing that, we decided to try a less invasive response. I took oral steroids for a week, and then strong NSAIDs twice a day. the steroids kicked in while I was at GenCon and it was pretty magical, all the pain went away, and stayed away. When I saw the doctor again later, he suggested I try to stop taking the NSAIDs and see what happened. Well, the pain came back in 2 days, so I went back on them.

However with NSAIDs on board, I was feeling great so I started back up with tennis. I took a couple of intense 1-on-1 lessons and loved it, and signed up for a couple of group classes. It was at one of those that my tendon snapped.

The MRI confirmed that I'd severed the tendon, pretty much at the point where the bone spur impinged on it. So now the surgery time frame is moved up a lot. On October 14th, or sooner if there is a cancellation, I'm going to be cut on and have the bone spur planed off, then the tendon will be extracted from my calf where it's all bunched up, and extended, and reattached to the bottom part of the tendon. There's a severed messy bit that will have to be excised.

I get 8-12 weeks of immobilization and then I start rehabbing it.

I'm not looking forward to all this, but at least it will be done, and there's a good chance of regaining 100% strength in it. I know on my left foot, it feels better than it had in years, so I'm hopeful about that.

I just want to get it over with.

So now that I can't hit the gym and the courts 4-5 times a week, I've got to come up with an upper body workout routine and watch what I'm eating more. I don't want to lose too much ground to this.