The Road to Recovery: Part 2

Did you miss part 1 of this series on Chris’s Achilles rupture and subsequent recovery? Check it out here.

Surgery was a blur. I don’t remember much after I was given anesthetics. I only recall pondering aloud, as my wife drove me home, “Who put my pants back on?” To this day, this mystery remains unsolved.

At my follow up with my surgeon, I was told that my tear was SEVERE, and my Achilles was absolutely mangled. His exact words were, “It was shredded like a horse’s tail.” I was informed that pickleball was not the catalyst of the tear, but that my Achilles had been ready to burst at any time. I guess it was better playing pickleball vs. squatting with a bar on my back.

So why did my Achilles tear? No one will ever know for sure, but I can piece a few things together:

  1. I had previously injured that ankle, severely, in a past life when I was a professional wrestler.
  2. I specifically remember back in 2008, I noticed my right foot would evert whenever I would do squats, lunges, or calf raises. This progressively got worse over the years.
  3. The three weeks before my injury I was training calves, HEAVY, five times per week.
  4. The week before the injury, I woke up the day after playing pickleball, and I felt a searing pain permeating from my right heel. I could barely walk and was concerned I would not even make it into work that day. I deduced it was the sneakers I had been playing in (I don’t own tennis shoes; I only have weight lifting and Minimus shoes). Thinking this was the problem, I bought a new pair of tennis shoes to wear the following week. Nope—it was an inflamed, weakened, and already slightly torn Achilles. I’ve seen the movie Troy; I should have seen this coming.
  5. It probably didn’t help that my life stress level had been on max for the past few months.

I’ll never know the exact reason it tore, but that’s a pretty good breadcrumb trail. At this point, it doesn’t matter; I’m only concerned with recovery.

Here’s the plus—it could have been way worse. I only tore my Achilles tendon. I could have lost a leg in Iraq, lost an eye, or lost a child—serious shit happens to people every day. I’ll be fine.

The first thing I needed to do was get my head screwed on right. Some thoughts helped me do this:

  1. I’ve come back from surgery before, even better than before. I can do it again.
  2. Children’s brains have way more elasticity than adults. I forgot where I read this, but the author spoke about children and adults, both of who lost their eyesight through an accident. Within a week, the children were able to adapt and go right back to playing. Adults? It ruined the rest of their lives. Some never recovered mentally. I decided I want to be elastic.
  3. I can use this opportunity to further develop my upper body.
  4. My mother-in-law put this one in my head: “Everything happens for a reason.” (Side note: it wasn’t until weeks later, after much introspection, that I agree that this probably did happen for a reason, and I will come out of it with a healthier life mindset.)
  5. Time is going to pass either way, so how am I going to handle it? Like a mopey, curmudgeonly grouch, who is no fun to be around and pushes everyone away with his negative disposition and furrowed brow? I can drive my wife up a wall and have her second guessing every decision she’s made since meeting me, as the stress and negativity of being around me seeps through her natural aura of positivity, and like a crack in the hull of a ship, the only positive is that the rains of my gloomy outlook and hopelessness will slowly fill and sink her vessel until she becomes a drowned corpse on the bottom of the sea who is only brought to life again as a cautionary tale passed on from generation to generation of why not to marry a mopey, pessimistic defeatist. She’ll then give me the boot, kick me out, and I won’t have a leg to stand on. I’ll probably have to go get a job at IHOP.

Or I can adopt a positive, can-do, optimistic, happy-go-lucky mindset that fuels me as well as all those with whom I associate. I can refuse to be around any negativity and only surround myself with ambitious, caring, bucket fillers, forming a team of winners who bring each other up through motivation, positivity, and living a life of purpose. I can woo my wife like a one-legged Casanova and let her know what it feels like to be legless as well when I sweep her off her feet, and we have one of the best bonding and connecting experiences of our life—because if we can get through this, we can certainly get through anything.

The toughest part to wrap my head around was the amount of work and time it is going to take to recover and come back better than ever. However, I haven’t had a personal purpose in a long time. I was going to approach this like training for an athletic event. I felt determined and motivated. It was time to go to war.

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Coming next: how much pain is pain, and what is life like on one leg?

About the author

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Chris Rombola
chris@myfithouse.com | Profile

Chris is the owner of Fit House. He's run the training departments at several commercial gyms, and after years of seeing how awful those environments were for his clients, he opened his own studio. He is devoted to getting people strong, lean, and healthy.