Tag: surgery

Recovering From Foot Surgery: What it was Really Like

Erica1 Comment

Exactly one year ago, my husband and I had just gotten back from taking an 11-day trip to Japan for our 10th anniversary. That was where my foot problems had started – about halfway through the trip my left foot began hurting so much that it began to be difficult to walk very much. After months and months of wearing foot braces and walking boots, it was finally determined that I would need surgery.

I had surgery on February 4th of this year – it’s been a little more than 15 weeks now. I would say I am about 85% recovered. There’s still a long way to go on building up my leg and foot muscles since they were out of use for so long, and I still don’t have quite the same range of motion that my other foot has, but I expect that over time it will continue to improve.

I had never had any sort of surgery before, so I really didn’t know what to expect. For those who may be in similar situations, or are just genuinely interested, I thought I would write a bit about what the whole experience has been like. Each person is different and heals at different speeds, but the following is what it has looked like for me.

***I won’t include any pictures until the end – there are some who may not want to see them – THIS IS YOUR WARNING, there are post-surgery foot pictures at the end of this post***

Feb 4 – Day of surgery – I was most nervous about being put under anesthesia since I had never experienced that before. It was an outpatient procedure, I went in early that morning and was supposed to be home by the early afternoon. For those who are wondering, this surgery was to address my posterior tibial tendon, which is a tendon that supports the arch of the foot and connects to the calf muscle. (I have flat arches and the arch was “collapsing” so that my foot was not supporting me correctly.) The technical name of the surgery was super long, and the only thing I remember about it was the word “osteotomy,” which involves cutting into the bone and for my situation, placing metal grafts in two places in my foot. I ended up coming out with four incisions, three on my foot and one higher up on my calf (they had to do a calf muscle lengthening procedure).

I remember them wheeling me back to the operating room and seeing those big lights above me. I expected them to ask me to count backwards from 10, but as soon as they put the mask over my nose and mouth, I remember nothing else except waking up in the recovery area. The surgery took between 2-3 hours, and I woke up with a huge splint and wrapping on my foot. I wasn’t in a ton of pain because the doctor had injected a pain blocker into my foot which would slowly wear off over the next couple of days. It was weird not being able to feel my foot or toes, but so far it wasn’t too terrible.

Upon getting home and “walking” into the house (I was using a knee scooter) I suddenly felt extremely nauseous and threw up. I thought it was due to the anesthesia, but I would later find out it was a reaction to the pain pills they prescribed me.

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Surgeries, Knee-Scooters, and a Case of the Flu

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*This is one of those posts where I started writing it a few weeks ago, and I finished it today… sorry in advance for the possibly confusing timeline*

As I write this, my son is playing in his room right now, having no-so-quiet “quiet time.” He’s having a tea party with his stuffed animals, pretending to be their mother – I don’t want to forget these sweet times and memories.

It’s a Sunday afternoon, it’s been an interesting weekend that started out with my husband getting sick and potentially having the flu – so, most of our weekend has involved just staying at home.

At the initial time of writing this, I was almost 3 weeks post-surgery – I had surgery on my foot to reconstruct my fallen arch – it included 4 incisions (3 on my foot, one on my calf) and 2 bone grafts. I am not allowed to put weight on my foot for about 5-6 weeks after surgery, so needless to say it’s been a bit harder for me to do my typical activities.

Yesterday when my husband told me he was sick – initially my stomach dropped. He has been my rock while I’ve been recovering from surgery – he’s taken our son to and from daycare every day, he’s dropped me off at work (my first week back was last week), he’s done all the driving/errands… I quickly recovered from the shock and told myself that my time of rest and recovery was over – it really was a noticeable shift in my mind. I had been comparing my husband to my knight in shining armor the last few weeks, and now I was picking up my sword and shield, donning my own armor, for my family that needed me.

I had never actually gotten in and out of our car by myself yet post-surgery. My knee scooter presents a challenge, in that it’s hard for me to get it in and out of the car without help (especially when I can’t use one of my legs!) But, in the current desperate times, I decided it was time to figure it out. I did a test run – if I balanced my bad leg on the driver’s seat with the side door open, I could fold up my scooter and get it in the car without falling over. Success! I’ll admit, I was pretty proud of myself for my abilities and my level of self-sufficiency.

One of the many humbling lessons I’m learning from having surgery, is that just because you can do something by yourself, doesn’t mean you should, or that you can’t ask for help.

So, I did what any person (well, any over-achieving person struggling with pride) would do: I asked for help by not asking for help. I sent a message to a group of people from church and asked for prayers. I’m not implying that prayers were not appreciated or helpful – but secretly, what I really hoped was that someone would read between the lines of my request and say, “what can I do for you?”

And because I have some lovely and caring (and insightful) people in my life, that’s exactly what happened. And even then, it was still hard to voice what I needed. There’s vulnerability in asking – there’s a chance people will say no, and that it will hurt. Do people really want to spend their time and energy helping me? Am I worth it?

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