Scott Douglas’ Terse Bloviation

Later this afternoon I’m going to have surgery to repair my right peroneus brevis tendon. I had hoped to avoid ever being cut open for running-related reasons, but oh well. Once every 34 years and 100,000 miles seems acceptable.

I’ll try to document this experience in the hope that others who might be having similar issues can learn. As with most health-related Internet searches, especially for relatively obscure running injuries, I encountered more confusion than clarity.

Later I’ll describe at length the symptoms, probable causes and concatenation of bad decisions I made that led to having surgery. For now I’ll keep it to a few pre-surgery photos that show some of what’s been going on.

The other day I took photos of my lateral right and left ankles. These are far from the most illustrative images, but you should get the idea. Notice the swelling and general “extra stuff” around the right ankle compared to the left. (Both look a little weirder than usual because I’d just gotten off the bike when I took these.)

First is the asymptomatic (but hardly beautiful!) left ankle.

Here’s the right ankle.

The other at-a-glance noticeable difference is left and right lower leg diameter. Here the right one is smaller, because favoring the damaged tendon for months led to atrophy of the muscles on that side. In this photo the difference is most noticeable toward the top of the lateral lower leg, where the relevant tendons and muscles start. There’s also a significant difference in calf diameter that I wasn’t able to capture using my iPhone.

Hmm, seems I need to start getting ready to leave for surgery. The next post will probably be immediate post-surgery stuff, then I’ll get more into the back story.