Got the stitches out yesterday, two weeks and two days after going under the knife to repair insertional Achilles tendonitis. This consisted of opening my right leg up in two places, the order of which is unknown to me because I was visiting Betelguese during the procedure. I assume my description follows the logical progression with mucking around inside someone's leg.
The lower incision ran approximately four inches from the base of my heel straight up the ridge to just above the ankle bulge. With the flaps spread apart, the surgeon detached the tendon and removed a section of bone roughly the size of a ping pong ball.
Then he inserted anchors in the remaining bone and reattached the Achilles.
The second incision was made about four inches further up and a little around the left side of the calf. It was a neat little opening about 1.5 inches long through which the surgeon could separate two muscles and get to the same tendon, cutting it, and inserting sutures to lengthen it slightly.
Until last night, most of the discomfort I've experienced in conjunction with this painfully silly episode in my otherwise ludicrous life was centered around the smaller incision and the area in the calf above it, all the way to the knee.
But then I was given der Stiefel, which looks like a discard from early prototypes of Robert Downey Jr's leggings in Jon Favreau's IronMan. It promised to be so much better than the previous plaster casts, but promises are made to be shattered over your unsuspecting skull like a PBR bottle during polite poopadoodlian discourse at The Libertarian Bar and Grill.
Things were OK until I decided to go to bed. I had already taken the thing off to ice the leg, heel, and top of the foot where I had developed a new purple and green bruise between two of my toes.
According to the original plan, I'm supposed to be off my feet for 6-10 weeks, with no weight on the foot whatsoever for the first month. The boot is supposed to be worn whenever I'm not icing or washing or immersing the leg, which means it's on when I hit the sack.
Just to be safe, considering what happened last week when the original cast was changed, I took two Vicodin to put me under and 20 minutes later I began to experience the most wonderful combination of spasms, stinking, burning, and tearing sensations all along the stitch line on the heel, and it persisted all night, despite another dose of Vicodin as the temperature outside dipped to 12° at 3 in the morning.
Called the doctor's office and the nurse asked why I wasn't using the night splint.
"What night splint?" I asked.