Anklitis

As soon as I landed I knew that this was much worse than any of the other ones. I've been prone to ankle sprains for the last decade or so. The first time that I ever had an ankle injury was one spring afternoon in the backyard of one of my good friends. As precocious young children we often sought fun in precarious ways. On this particular day my neighborhood cohorts and I encountered a number of mattresses in a dumpster. Naturally, we laid claim to our treasures and took them back to my friend Shu Shu's house. We started jumping on the mattresses while imitating wrestling moves for a few hours until one of us realized that the mattresses were probably extremely dirty. It was then that we started spraying the mattresses off with a hose and were surprised to see a foamy liquid emit from the first mattress, much to our chagrin we realized that these mattresses were laden with urine from one of our good neighbors. The spraying of the mattresses continued for a few hours until we were satisfied that all of the urine was cleaned out. During the hours that it took for our new "toys" to dry we cogitated about the possible uses. Wrestling mats, makeshift sleds, a motorized bed and other ridiculous uses. We finally settled on an idea, we would jump off of the trampoline and land on the mattresses doing various stunts, flips and aerials. Now the trampoline at our disposal was not your conventional round tramp that was so common in the late 1990's, not this was one of the old rectangle tramps that provided possible injury at any jump (which could possibly be said of any tramp, although these seemed much more dangerous). The fun started off innocent enough, we'd jump off on the mattresses on our feet first and then onto our back and then some flips. The ante kept on escalating until finally I decided to jump as high as I could and land on my feet on the far side of the mattress. I took off confident in my take off, but quickly started to fade to the right, I waved my arms frantically to try and control my drift, but as I came down my right foot landed outside the mattress and rolled my right ankle hard. It felt (and sounded) like it popped as soon as I landed. I laid down instantly and tried to move my ankle, but it was quickly swelling up to unnatural sizes. As I limped home, I winced with every step as I could barely walk. Days of my foot in ice packs and bowls followed as I utilized crutches to make my way around school and home. Since that first sprain I have injured each of my ankles numerous times. The most recent one was last Tuesday at a Church pick up game. I was driving to the middle of the lane and came down on someone's foot. As I mentioned at the beginning of this post I knew that this one was worse than the others. I could feel a small pop in my ankle and was sure that I had done some damage. I was determined to walk it off like all of the others, but my dad encouraged me to go get an x-ray. I had not been able to put any weight on my ankle for two days and was rather discouraged that I had fractured my ankle. As I sat in the doctor's office I offered a silent prayer that nothing was broken and that this wouldn't hinder me with everything that I needed to get done that week. As the doctor walked in my heart dropped, but I was soon reassured that I had only suffered a small bone chip and that the ankle would be ok. I was so relieved. The next day I found that I could move around a lot easier and that the swelling wasn't as bad as the previous day. I'm sure that there was some sort of divine intervention because there was such a stark contrast from the previous day. There was still some swelling as the days continued, but overall there should be a full recovery. I did however get a call from the radiologist today that there was a small crack in the bone that could have happened last week or could have been older. Perhaps that first trampoline incident was more serious than I first anticipated, but I feel blessed to know that I should be fine.

Here are some pics of the recent injury



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