Today Tam and I went to have our tattoos touched up. It’s a free service that you get after a tattoo to make sure everything is just perfect. I got a few vines on my heart and flowers, and got some pink on my fairy’s wings as well as a few little touch ups on my fairy. Our tattoo artist is AMAZING and he just got his own place, so we really enjoyed being some of his first clients there!
As we were finishing up, I called my orthopedist because I had some questions about my ankle. It turns out they had an appointment in an hour, so we just headed right there next!
Last time I saw him was in January, and he said if my ankle doesn’t improve, I probably would need surgery. Pretty much every day, my ankle aches at least a little bit. It could be 5 min or it could be an hour. It is better in that it isn’t sharp pain anymore, but more of aching feelings. But it hurts more if I do any walking. Like even a 5 min walk to the pharmacy and back causes pain.
With my arthritis, I can walk about 20 minutes, sometimes more. But now I can’t even do that because of my ankle. So I had some questions for my orthopedist about getting surgery.
He said my ankle is not going to get better, no matter how much I rest it. For those who don’t remember, I have a talar dome lesion and cyst on my ankle bone. Luckily he said that walking on it also won’t make the injury much worse, though it will cause a lot of pain. So if I do want to walk, I can just suck it up and be in pain without much fear of injuring myself.
He said the surgery involves drilling little holes in my cartilage to encourage the bone marrow to get in there and regrow more cartilage. It has a 90% success rate, and he said as long as you do your physical therapy, the surgery will probably work and you’ll be cured for life.
Unfortunately, I will be totally 100% non-weight bearing for six weeks after surgery. That means no weight on it at all, not even to transfer. So that will be quite difficult!
Finally, I asked him what he would do, given that my walking is already limited by my arthritis, if it is worth getting surgery. He said he almost never goes with the surgical option, but if he were in my situation, he’d definitely be scheduling surgery as soon as possible.
So I told him to go ahead and start the process of going through insurance and scheduling surgery.
I hope to be able to get it around early June or so. But we will see what insurance and my doctor’s schedule says.
Although surgery isn’t fun, I look forward to being able to walk the dogs again! It’s been almost a year since I was able to do that with any regularity.