So I’ve been trying to work out why my ankle injury has totally consumed me.

It’s partly because I’m obsessive, but when you reliase what I’ve been working on these past few months you’ll understand why.

They say blogging can be therapeutic, here I go.

After traveling overseas twice in about five months, I was frustrated at how unfit I was. I’m actually in my early 30s despite what my bio line says on the blog, I’m 34.

In December of 2010 I took a cruise to the south pacific, and in April of 2011 I spent a week in Singapore. On both trips there were many things I would have loved to have tried, embrace the spirit of adventure if you like. My weight mainly but also my fitness level of lack of it meant that many things were just not possible.

In 2011 I had both a cardic scare where I had severe chest pain which didn’t ease up for many hours. Now it probally wasn’t a heart attack, but it was likely chronic chest pain brought on my hear burn and anxitety. I did a stress test and cleared, but they had to stop the test half way through as I was unable to complete it. For my age I was incredibly unfit.

This prompted my GP to run a complete set of blood tests.

In a surprise to no one it showed an impaired glucose tolerance. This means that my sugar levels were quite high, so high in fact that I was knocking at the door of type II diabetes. The above was actually confirmed with a glucose tolerance test, it’s where you fast overnight, have one lot of blood taken, get given a sugary drink, sit in the clinic for two hours then get more blood taken. It’s actually a rather unpleasant experience. This confirmed that unless I undertook lifestyle changes rapidly within a year I’d have type two diabetes.

At that point I also had very high blood pressure, so much so I was close to having to be medicated for it. I have a close friend who is on blood pressure medication and he tells me that once you go on it it’s virtually impossible to get off it. He has also experienced occasions where he has actually had diabetic episodes and had to massive change his diet.

So all of that put together made me think that at at 33 I’d better do something.

I already had some potential contacts, I just had to make use of them.

I’m not going to go into graphic detail about how my journey started from there, I’m going to summarize, otherwise this entry will be in the thousands of words rather than hundreds!

So from October 2011 to mid January 2012 I was doing an hour of personal training a week, a 90 minute group Pilates class, 3 x 45 minute aqua classes and in the end I also added one 55 minute group boxing x-train class.

I built it as part of my routine, it meant I was doing a lot of exercise, the KG’s were dropping off rapidly, people were noticing massive loss I loved the exercise and I got hooked on the fitness bug, the adrenaline wasn’t too bad either!

In early January I did a couple of things in the pool which brought about the start of my ankle trouble.

I’m badly flat footed and have worn orthodontics in my shoes in both my work and casual shoes for years. I actually have two pairs.

When I walk in the water I roll my ankle/foot significatley and I was starting to experience to minor sprains.

It got progressively worse and I needed to slow down and modify my exercise.

There was one aqua  class I remember jumping up and down in the water and while at the time it seemed ok, in hindsight I think that was a really dumb thing to do.

The lateral process of the talus fracture I had is more commonly known as “snowboarder’s ankle” a condition seen when snowboarders land badly on jumps.

From what I understand I can’t think of any other way I could have caused this fracture.

My surgeon tells me it’s possible you can just land oddly just walking but I think the pool is more likely a cause.

Anyhow a few days later I had the busiest few days of the year. We host an international education workshop for 3-4 days and I’m the ICT  / AV Lead. It means I need to be in about 3-4 places at once. Because of a change in staff this year I took a more “all rounder” approach too. It meant that I was covering about 10KM a day and it was a lot of up and down stairs.

By the end of the three days I could hardly walk. Yet I still wanted to exercise so I continued into the pool on the Saturday morning to undertake a heavily modified aqua class.

I was in pain from the start and should have stopped, yet I continued on and slowed down.

This still wasn’t enough, in the end I was in so much pain I had to leave the class early and gingerly walk out of the pool.

A mix of still wanting to exercise, keep fit and lose weight saw me continue and push to continue to do exercise.

In the end on advise from my Physio I stopped all exercise and then started a gradual return to exercise. It was soon clear that most forms of weight bearing exercise was problematic and there was something seriously wrong.

I was very quick in getting scans done as my gut feeling told me that something was really wrong. X-Ray , Ultrasound and then MRI.

I consulted a orthopedic surgeon who gave me a base diagnosis but he couldn’t explain why I was in so much pain. In the end he put me in a pneumatic foam walker (moon boot) which was in hope of reducing the pain by imoblization. This gave me false hope as it really didn’t fix the problem. It did mean I could get around more and with less pain, but it didn’t fix the underlying problem.

The surgeon couldn’t explain the pain level and so the next stage was surgery. Ankle Arthoscopy is now quite common. Sometimes it is used for diagnosis purposes, but never having had surgery before I was concerned that I would be asked to consent and go under for my surgeon to “go hunting”. I didn’t have a lot of confidence in this surgen so I reached out to my long term podiatrist about who she would recommend.

I took her advise and made a booking, I had to wait a couple of weeks to get in which seemed liked dead time. The pain was getting worse, my range of moment was reducing but also fluctuating and my ability to sleep and deal with work diminished as the pain I was it made in untenable.

I finally managed to see the surgeon and had a date for about two weeks later for surgery.

In the end I had to take leave from work as I was unable to cope and function at work. It was one of the hardest things I’ve had to justify to myself. I managed to back myself into a situation where I was unable to cope until I had surgery.

This was largely due to the chronic pain I was in and how drawn out it was.

Thankfully now I’ve had surgery and my rehab while slow is coming along well. This day last week was the day of surgery and while I am no where near recovered (recovery is around 4-6 weeks) I actually am a lot better.

So that is the journey to now, unable to work, unable to do anything but seated exercise it’s really gut wrenching, not only in pain but frustration.

So I felt and enjoyed the highs that a change of diet and exercise brought, but that largely fell down and I was left to convalesce. In the end I did “pre-hab” to get back ankle strength and prepare for surgery.

It was one big rug pulled out from under me. While it might seem over dramatic when you’ve the lightest and healthiest you’ve been in years and everyone notices and comments. To be left virtually a cripple depdant on help it’s damn hard.

I’m just lucky the journey to rehab will be relatively short, it’s expected to only be a matter of a few weeks.

So once again I still somehow remain positive, it doesn’t mean I’ve kept it together all the time, but now more than ever I’m motivated for change.