Last time I wrote about my Achilles tear, thing were going well. I was being a model patient. I was very careful not to over-do it.
And yet, I still over-did it. On a bike ride a week ago, I aggravated my calf muscle while climbing a hill, and it swelled up big-time. After a week of self-therapy, it wasn’t getting better, so today I went back to the doctor. I was scared to death that I had re-torn the tendon, and that I would have to start over. Six weeks of healing down the drain.
The good news is that I didn’t re-injure the tendon. The bad news is that I did “anger”, as the Doc called it, the calf muscle because it wasn’t used to the amount of stress I put on it. ( Really? My calf muscle couldn’t handle that one small hill? Man, I’ve lost a lot of strength in six weeks.) The tendon can’t continue to heal with lots of swelling around it. So I got a steroid shot to make the swelling go down and I have to take it very easy for a couple of weeks.
Its a frustrating set-back considering I thought I was doing everything right. But fortunately, it is only a minor set-back and it will serve as a strong reminder to be very cautious in the future.
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