Achilles Rupture Recovery

I was originally told: you have to wear the VACOped boot 24/7, you sleep in it, and you don’t even take it off to shower. Of course, I had to take it off for medical exams … and already on the third day post-injury, when I did so, the stink nearly knocked me out. Disgusting.

My GP later told me: this is to make sure that no one thinks the boot is optional. Of course, one of the advantages of wearing a boot instead of a cast is that you can take it off to shower. Even if you’ve lost (or never had) the fear of being bootless, it still makes sense to be careful when having a shower, hence here are some tips on showering.

Once one has started down the ‘road to recovery’, this is probably the biggest worry many people initially have: what happens if I damage (re-rupture) my partially healed Achilles tendon, and / or, how do I avoid (read ‘minimise the risk of’) this potential problem?

There are probably as many answers to these questions as there are, were and will be people on this planet. Nevertheless, again, I’ve attempted to provide a collection of links and infos on this subject.

The initial biggest dread for most people, once they’ve settled down on their ‘recovery journey’, is the re-rupturing of a partially rehabbed tendon. However, once one starts reading a little deeper into the subject, it becomes fairly clear that an elongated Achilles (one that has ‘healed too long’) is at least as big a risk / problem as a re-rupture, since, if your Achilles heals ‘too long’, it is generally accepted that there’s nothing you can do other than have it operated (if it’s functionally important enough). And THAT means: back to Day 0.

So, what can one do to avoid this? How big of a problem is it, even? Can you detect it ‘as it happens’? I asked myself these questions as well as some others – infos I collected on the subject can be found here.

So, you’ve gotten the first couple of weeks or so after the injury / operation behind you … and it’s almost certainly been made clear to you that you’re going to need physiotherapy to come out the other side of this injury with a halfway acceptable bodily function.

However, … < work-in-progress >