It's been 17 months now since I broke my ankle. I get a fair amount of hits from people with fresh trimalleolar fractures who are looking for some idea of what they’re in for, and I occasionally get some pleasant emails from them. That’s what I built the whole Breakage category for, so I want to keep adding to it. I find that there’s relatively little information out there on what can be expected during the long-term healing process, and the few bloggers I know who have already been through this part have sort of refused to blog about it when I asked them. One does want to move on after awhile, and not talk about it so much. Understandable, but this is a loss, because this sort of an injury requires a very long healing process. One can be walking again in three months, and out of physical therapy in six. But that isn’t the end of it for you, and it’s sort of scary not to know if your progress is normal or not, and how long things might take.

The first winter was very interesting for me, because I wasn’t used to being a human barometer. Cloudy weather was very painful for me last year, and the sharpness of the pain frightened me. I made an appointment with my surgeon at the end of the semester for a follow-up, and we discussed taking the hardware out. I wanted to avoid that if possible, since the idea of re-opening ten inches of incisions and being out of commission for 4-6 weeks wasn’t particularly appealing. And in January, the pain suddenly started to fade a bit. Not so much that I forgot about it, but enough that I didn’t really think surgery would be necessary.

I’ve continued to get stronger all spring. Somewhere around the one-year point, I stopped thinking about every single step I took. I’m still conscious of uneven pavement and stairs, but not so much as I used to be. Uneven turf continued to be painful until the beginning of summer, and it’s just in the past couple of weeks that I have been able to comfortably squat again and sort of run across intersections. I have a very strange running gait now, but I expect that will even out more over time. (And it’s not like I was much of a runner anyway.)

Climate changes are still a problem, and the surgeon says they will be pretty much forever. If the weather changes from clear to cloudy in the night, I’ll be very hobbly for the first fifteen minutes or so that I’m up. I might get another cane this winter for the very cloudy days.

I’ve begun having some chiropractic work done to break up some of the scar tissue, and my massage therapist also pays a fair amount of attention to it. It’s painful work, but I think of regained a bit more flexibility from it. The first time my chiropractor adjusted my ankle this summer, I yelled. When I went back to the waiting room, there was a first-time patient sitting there and she looked at me with dinner-plate eyes. I felt bad for scaring her, but I also couldn’t help but laugh.

A couple of people with similar injuries have told me that they didn’t really begin to feel normal again until they were between three and four years out. That makes sense to me. I’ll post again on my two-year anniversary in February and let you know how the second winter goes.