As it Stands

I was pretty freaked out by Monday about my ankle. Not sure if this has come up before, but I don't have health insurance. That means that if I fall off my bike and break my collar bone, I am (going to censor my language for the protection of readers who are younger and/or related to me). So all day at work, people kept asking, "Have you seen a doctor yet?" No! You know I don't have health insurance, so you should know that the medical profession is a last-resort type of thing for me! But of course, everyone thinks that doctors are the end-all-be-all to telling you how your body works and what it needs (here's a quick clue: they're not).

But having everyone tell me how important it was that I get it checked out was really making stressed. I started creating scenarios: what if it is broken, or torn? What if I have to have some kind of surgery? What if my ankle is permanently screwed unless I do such-and-such A.S.A.P.?

Then I talked with one of my physical therapist friends (who began by saying, "Have you seen a doctor yet?"). I know there's no telling without an X-ray or possibly and MRI, but in her opinion, the ankle's not swollen enough to indicate break, tear, rupture, or anything else equally unpleasant. She recommended that I go through as full and natural a range of motion with it as possible and put as much weight on it as I could stand. In other words, treat it as close to normally as you can.

So I hobbled around on crutches for a couple days (just to take some of the weight off the leg), and each day has gotten progressively better. Today I'm off the crutches and walking almost normally; if you didn't know I'd been hurt, you wouldn't notice me limping. Ankle is still swollen, and there's going to be some pretty severe bruising, I'm sure. It's tender on the medial side of the Achilles (but it was always sore there, where I have tendinitis), and on the lateral front ankle, where I think I hyper-stretched something (peroneals, maybe?).

I've been swimming with a pull buoy, and lifting weights. I guess one good thing about this injury is that it forces me to do the two things I haven't been doing at all over the past month or two! I think I'll be back on the bike by the weekend, and if it's feeling all right, I'll go ahead and race women's cat 4 at the DeStad opener this weekend; I was really wanting to do all five of those races!

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