May 10th 2010 - Back to Work

Today I went back to work for the first time since my injury. I got into the office around 9am and was able to make it through the majority of the day with little pain. I work in an office setting, so most of my day involves sitting at a desk, working on my computer and phone. I have not taken any pain medication for a day and a half now, and I can really start to feel some of the post-op discomfort that was explained to me from day 1. After lunch, there was some noticeable throbbing, most likely from not being able to properly elevate my leg while working. I made it until around 3:30pm at work, and at that point I was just too uncomfortable to stay. I went home to prop my leg back up, and actually felt much better once I was able to do this.

It was at this point when I began to get a little upset with the reality of my situation. I expected to get back to work after a week off and have everything be just fine. It now started to hit me about how limited my activities were going to be for a while, about how long the road to a full recovery was going to be, and it got me pretty frustrated. I've always been an active person, and have been relatively injury free my whole life. To have something like this happen right as the weather is getting warmer and the summer is just around the corner was devastating to think about. All I was focusing on was what I will be missing out on and because this injury is different for everyone, I really had no realistic timeframe to look at to draw any sort of light at the end of the tunnel.

It was this day that I got online and really started looking for info about my injury. I read medical journals, e-zines written by physical therapists about achilles recover, and found a few blogs from people that had experienced this injury first hand. This is where I was able to find some solace and really began to focus on the fact that things were eventually going to be ok. I read blog after blog about people that pushed themselves too hard and ended up having to go back through surgery 9 months to a year later. I read about those that took things slow and were able to make a full recovery within a reasonable time frame. All of these stories of people that had experienced what I was going through was really what picked me back up, gave me some time to think about what kind of goals I wanted to set, and really made me see that this injury was really not the worst thing that have could happened.