Meet my right ankle, it’s been very, very bad. Early November, during training, my ankle locked up as it is wont to do. I couldn’t get it to unlock before my patience ran out so I decided to continue training with a locked ankle, which wasn’t ideal but it didn’t bother me too much. The next day I woke up and it had swollen up to the size of a tennis ball. Eew.
It remained swollen for longer than I was comfortable with, so after quite a bit of bullying from friends and family, I ended up going to my doctor. After hearing the trouble that I’ve been having with that ankle since I was six, I was sent on to an orthopaedic specialist at the hospital.
There they made the x-rays you can see above and informed me that I had about a dozen bone splinters rummaging around in my ankle, which is bad. It was explained to me like there was a hand full of pebbles tossed into a gearbox. Also, some of the edges had grown spurs which were impeding the full range of motion of my ankle. All bad.
I had an MRI made to see if there was any damage to any ligaments or any swelling inside the joint. It turns out there was. One of my outside ligaments had lost much of its strength and apparently required some “stitching” because the bone fragments had likely caused damage to it.
The advice I got was to have surgery to clear up all the debris from my join, shave down some of the bone spurs, have that ligament stitched up in order to reinforce it, drill a few holes in my fibula and pull the ligament through and attach it on the other side in order to tighten the whole ankle up. Recovery time? Six weeks of a cast, and at least another six weeks of fysiotherapy.
Fuck me.
