Ankles

Soooooooo (rubs eyes, yawns, blinks hard, stretches arms etc), where was I? When I last posted, I was roughly three months into my rehab, and golly, ain't it just been a long and windin' road since then? The usual rehab period for an ACL reconstruction, for those stupid enough to want to play football again, is about nine months. And I was right on course...

After endless months of gyms, swimming pools, wobble boards, lunges, and hamstring catches, I was ready. In September (this is still in 2007, for those who like to know where there are, year-wise) I started a bit of the ol' pass-and-move, on-me-ed-son, hoof-it-to-row-Z, ankle-kickin' five-a-side. I might even have scored the odd screamer, and looked forward (eagerly, like a hyperactive dribbling dog) to the day when my amateur football career could be brought back from the dead.

Except... After a few weeks or so of the aforementioned silky football, I felt something in my ankle. Something wrong. Like something bad was lodged in there, and was pressing down on all the tendons or muscles or fleshy-bits or something. It made it hurt to kick, run, and do all the other things people associate with running around and kicking footballs in the Oxford City FA RT Harris League Division 1 on a Saturday afternoon.

Oh dear, I thought. Back to square one. Or at best, square three. Maybe square four, if I was lucky. So began a new round of doctors, appointments, waitings, queues, scans, letters, X-rays, diagnoses, more waiting, and a whole load of sitting around on my fat arse, very much not playing football.

It seemed that I had bone spurs (alas, no other cowboy paraphernalia) in my ankle, floating around and causing a general nuisance. Cricket fans among you will note that this is the same injury as suffered by dear ol Fred, bringing my unwanted collection of injuries-of-the-rich-and-famous to two (alas, I've yet to find a sports star who has broken their big toe doing a teenage 'stage dive' off a bed, but the search is still on).

A note here for my GP. Most of the time, I love my GP. Her motherly ways have soothed many an ailment. But on this occasion, when I asked whether I could have bone spurs (having done a little a bit of research, and been pointed in this direction by Gem 'ankles' de Silva), she pretty much told me that it was impossible. She actually huffed, with you're-totally-wasting-my-time eyes, that only really old ladies got bone spurs. Verdict? GPs: lovely people, don't always know much about ankles. Worth remembering, I'd say.

So where did all this leave me? Up a football creak without a paddle/ankle. All I could do was wait, for the X ray to show that I had bone spurs, and then the follow-up appointment to tell me I needed a scan, and then the scan to show that I really did have bone spurs, and then the follow-up appointment to confirm that, can you believe it, I have bone spurs, and then, finally, the small operation to remove the bone spurs.

And all that waiting brought me up to June 2008. Over two years since my last game (scroll down to 'that's entertainment') for the Street...

Turps

Operations, they're bleedin hilarious, aren't they? Some half-wit attacks your leg with a pen-knife and some turps, and then leaves you in the hands of physiotherapists who tell you to do dozens of exercises that redefine tedious and remind you that your once-fully-functioning leg can now do no more than bend very stiffly about 45 degrees before shooting PAIN appears where once you had hamstrings.

Oh dear, think I had a bad day. I shouldn't take it out on those heroes in the NHS. Love those dudes, man. They're just awesome, with their white coats, painkillers and friendly knee-surgery ways. Kiss them all week.

It's a long haul, this ACL reconstruction business. My leg seems to ache in new ways every day - hamstrings, thighs, calves, knee cap... And all the while I'm paranoid that I'm gonna bugger up all the good NHS-inspired work and have to go in for another operation. I've been told I can bend my leg but not twist it - and you'd be surprised how often you want to twist your leg. Every time I do, I can imagine my new ligament snapping off and it gives me the shivers. Got to think positively.

I'm driving, though, and walking about - stairs are fun. I take each step at a time and it takes me ages. People walking with me get bored and wait for me at the bottom. I used to be a bit of a bounder, a three-steps-at-a-time man, so it's a bit of a shock.

Anyway, I should be doing my exercises - good GOD they bore me senseless. All is not lost, though - Swindon Town got a last minute equaliser tonight, and Oxford United got beat again last night. Hoorah.

Operations

Oh, I'm sorry, I seem to have gotten ahead of myself. I've not even told you why I'm writing this yet. I've just had an operation on my knee, which I injured playing for the mighty Union Street FC back in March 2006. If you're interested in these things, I ruptured the ACL in my left knee winning a header against some chopsy-larrakin called Ramsey, and it took me all of 8 months to get an operation on the NHS.

The operation is really clever (or just plain horrific, depending on how squeamish you feel about these things). Your ACL (anterior cruciate ligament) is a ligament right in the middle of your knee that connects your tibia to your femur (look at me getting all technical) and stops your leg from shooting off in front of you. I ruptured that, which means that it isn't there any more (in the past 6 months I've learned the oh-so-important difference between a rupture and a tear).

You can play sport without an ACL - apparently my all-time Swindon Town hero, former Scotland midfielder and current Notts Forest manager Colin Calderwood kept playing after he ruptured it. It's just a question of building up the muscles around your knee (I imagine Colin had lovely thighs). But my consultant told me that if I want to play football - which is just about the nastiest thing you can do to your knees (just ask Martin Scarfe) - then an operation was the only way to go. Maybe he didn't like my thighs.

The ACL can't repair itself, so they (they being the clever doctors) need to graft (tear off) a bit of ligament from somewhere else. Sounds fun, huh? They could take a bit from the ligament that attaches your patella (knee cap) to your leg. Mmmm, nice. Or they could take a bit of your hamstring (there's plenty to spare apparently) - which was what they did with me.

So, the operation goes a little something like this: drug the patient til his eyes pop and make some quite neat little holes in the front of his leg. Somehow take a strip of his hamstring (apparently they test its strength mid-op on a ligament-strength-testing machine - images of giggling surgeons pinging ligaments around the operating theatre abound) and screw it into place using dissolvable screws (hopefully they're not made of sugar, or I'm farked). Stitch patient up, stick a worryingly-large tube in his thigh to drain the blood from the knee, and laugh when patient wakes up from his anaesthetic - babbling like a drunkard to everyone in the ward.

Ta-da!