My surgery is scheduled for Friday. Retinaculum repair with fibular groove deepening. I’m trying to figure out how much time to take off work. Fortunately I am able to work remotely, but when I’m working I’m expected to have some time every day in zoom meetings and I’m not really sure what to expect for pain and energy levels post op. I know everyone’s recover is different but does anyone remember how long it took them to be able to work remotely post op? So far I took off Friday and Monday but not sure if I’m being too optimistic
I had my retinaculum repaired and parts of the peroneal tendon muscle belly removed but did not have the groove deepened. Post op I was in a soft boot and after a week of rest I was back in the office on a knee scooter. The nerve block wears off after the first day and you'll definitely want to take your pain killers for the next couple days. The first 2 days I was mostly either laying in bed or on the couch and keeping my foot elevated to prevent the swelling from getting bad but towards the end of the first week I was feeling pretty normal with minimal pain. I think with the groove deepening your recovery will be a little longer and you might have more pain. I would recommend taking at least a week of rest.
Hey all. Curious if anyone else had trouble wearing their climbing shoes after coming back from the surgery. I had my surgery back in September and in a lot of ways things are mostly better. I’ve been working on running and jumping and stopped wearing my ankle brace while climbing with no issues. Oddly one of the few things that still causes significant pain, is putting on my normal climbing shoes (scarpa instincts). These shoes are normally so comfortable for me but now it is too painful to even keep on and climbing in them is not an option at all. Basically nothing else I’ve been doing hurts my ankle, but this causes a ton of pain and tightness on the outside of my ankle. Fortunately I have no issues in an oversized rental shoe so I’ll continue with this.
did others have the same issue and eventually it went away or do I need to give up on this shoe, which would make me pretty sad.
I did initially have issues wearing down turned shoes so for the first year post op I pretty much exclusively climbed in TC pros. Over time with PT and stretching it did go away.
Thanks for the response Steven. Wow a year is a lot longer than I was expecting. Good to hear you eventually got better. Were you doing PT for a whole year? Mine seem to want me to be done in about a month.
As for stretching, I’ve been doing a lot of Dorsiflexion stretches both with the knee bent and straight but they don’t have me doing any stretches into supination which seems to be what’s making the shoes uncomfortable. Are there any specific stretches that helped most?
Well I think part of it was that I got really comfortable being in TCs and started climbing everything in them and just never bothered to wear anything else. As for formal physical therapy I did it for 2-3 months until my physical therapist was comfortable releasing me. At that point though you aren't 100% fully healed, it's more like you are just recovered enough to do physical activity. My surgeon told me that it can take up to a full year for full recovery and I did feel like this was the case because I actually couldn't balance on 1 foot until the 1 year mark. After I stopped going to physical therapy I started running, biking, climbing, and staying active so I was still using my ankle and stressing it.
It could be useful to bring your climbing shoes to PT and work with your physical therapist if you have certain mobility goals. There's also a good chance that you'll never gain full mobility back. Unfortunately that's just what happens when tendons gets torn. I can't crack jam with my injured foot that well. Sometimes when I'm balancing on my injured foot my peroneal tendon will snap out of the groove slightly and I lose balance. So maybe overall, my injured foot is 95% as good as my other ankle and I've accepted that it'll likely be like this for the rest of my life. But YMMV, keep using that ankle and work through the pain, it'll get better!