So this past Saturday 1/4, I was tooling around in my backyard getting ready to install one of those ultrasonic cat repellers to try and deter the local felines from seeing my son’s sandbox as a giant litter box.
I went to go down the deck steps and stumbled, and landed on my right leg in an odd flat-footed way, and POP! my patellar tendon ruptured just below my kneecap. It immediately tried to contract, but I was lucky enough to somehow straighten it out and sit there and yell at my wife and/or call her on the phone until she could come out. The truly surreal thing about it is that outside of the actual tear itself, it didn’t really hurt at all sitting there with my leg extended afterward.
Long story short, I had an ambulance ride with a couple of rather knuckleheaded paramedics, spent about 4 hours in the ER, got admitted to the hospital and had repair surgery on Sunday afternoon, a little more than 24 hours later.
I’ve now been home since late Tuesday afternoon, and while I can actually put weight on it in the immobilizer using a walker, I’m still seriously limited in what I can do between pain, swelling and not being able to bend the knee.
In another two weeks I go in to get the staples out and start physical therapy.
Anyone had this injury before? What am I looking at? I’m also assuming that any sort of re-rupture would be pretty obvious and painful, and not the usual twingey/achey pain that I’m dealing with now if I overdo it a little bit. Anyone know anything about that either?