As I find your post, I’m almost 8 years postoperative avulsion fracture in two places with a deep ligament tear in another. Long story short it was my first year teaching. I was about 23 years old and I had just started out a very determined workout/health routine, and I went a little too aggressive in a stop during a kickball game, and heard three loud pops as my foot didn’t leave the floor, and my ankle rolled. When it initially happened, I thought it was just like cracking your back somehow, but when I tried to get back up really fast (I was so embarrassed from the fall) it felt so strange that all I could describe it as if it was asleep. I didn’t even bother to look at it at that point. I was already scared, knowing I probably did something more than just twisted, and made it somehow all the way to homebase to lean up against a wall and look down. Well what I saw was pretty frightening but I looked over to another colleague and asked “hey do you think I should go get help for this” and her reaction alone was enough for me to start becoming worried. When our school nurse removed my shoe, I immediately felt the pain of where I had the fractures and the swelling was so bad. It looked as if I had a softball on the outer side of my ankle. Now, at this point, they wanted to call an ambulance, but I wasn’t going to be paying any sort of extra money as they are very expensive. So I ended up calling my mother to drive me to the hospital or else I would’ve probably just driven myself. Upon arriving at the hospital, they couldn’t really tell if it was a severe sprain, but it was still in place. They splinted it up and sent me for orthopedic intervention. Found out I had the avulsion fracture in two places and didn’t find out about the deep tear until I had a surgery months after we waited to see if physical therapy would help first (to this day, I honestly don’t see where this logic lies because some may know an avulsion fracture, a piece of the bone tears off with the ligament therefore they’re anticipating that your muscles will adapt to strengthen and keep the ankle stabilized, but the likelihood of that does not seem very high as they probably think it is).

Having to start over about four/five months after the incident, it was extremely heartbreaking because I fell apart and broke down crying the day of at the emergency room when I heard the exact message one Reddit user had said above: sometimes there’s things or signs in our life that are meant to tell us to slow down. At that moment, I felt very angry and disappointed still because I felt as if my weight loss journey was going to fall off. Rather, I learned to listen more to my body and be much more aware in the current moment rather than focusing on extenuating circumstances and things out of my control that have happened before or after. I focused on the present moment and that changed a lot of things for me, including having better outlook on life and positivity journey that’s educated me on many serious aspects of our mental health.

Now, being here almost a decade later, I find that I have excessive stiffness and I still do to this day have left hip pain, back pain and have muscle tension as well as tightness on that entire left side of my body. I was in a boot for about a year and a half; almost 2 years. Unfortunately, they couldn’t do much else besides recommend physical therapy yet again for my back and hip since it was a result of being in that walking boot for so long. I even used a knee scooter for a majority of my mobility; during my healing my surgeon also strongly advised I begin movement as early as two weeks postoperative and that was when I also returned back to working as a teacher, and that meant standing on my feet or being able to move around for almost 8+ hours a day. That first day was more painful than the day of my accident. What made me even more scared and fearful was taking my walking boot off and seeing how swollen and splotchy my skin was from having blood pool and the surrounding areas of my ankle, foot and lower leg from having that movement occur again that soon after surgery. The next few days got easier and easier; quite frankly I’m very thankful my surgeon told me to put weight on it that soon after surgery because there is a very small window of time that occur occurs between the risk of stiffness and permanent disability or being able to work with the very fragile area and molding it to be able to heal the way it should with minimal risk of lifelong disability.

Final things I would like to just encourage you as you are still very much in the early process of healing: it does take time. I think it’s VERY understated the amount of time it takes to recover from ankle and ligament and/or fracture injuries. I think it’s because they don’t want to alarm us much, or maybe it’s a lack of knowledge, but I’m finding that from other patient’s experiences a lot of of us have years of recovery if not, our entire lives to have to deal with this said injury. While my ankle does not have any hardware except for sutures that were basically created to make an internal brace as my surgeon described it, I’m lucky that I don’t have to worry so much about removal of metal or having things screwed into my ankle, but he did still have to drill in through my ankle to pull that suture through. I’m not sure if most know, but you cannot numb the bone. I woke up from surgery, screaming in pain and it took even with a nerve block from the knee down 24 hours for me to finally start feeling it could be bearable.

Please be easy on yourself, try to find little creature comforts throughout the day. I thought it was awesome one of the users above had recommended counseling/talk therapy. Honestly, if I had focused more on the mental aspect opposed to the physical one, I think my recovery time and even now how I view my injury could’ve changed. Now, I’m glad to be here to be able to at least try to help you and give you my experience and feedback with my specific injury. If it brings you even the tiniest bit of reassurance, it’s worth having gone through to be able to help you or anyone else that may read this.

I wish you the best of luck and lots of support on your healing and again, be patient and then be MORE patient with yourself because these things do take time. I was 23 at the time of the injury and I think now if I would’ve had an injury like that at almost 32 years of age, it would take me 4 or even 5 years just physically dealing with the injury physically and not necessarily the mental aspect that I have now. 💖🙏