I'm 66 and a high-level doubles tennis player (for my age group, sigh), playing 20 hours a week.  A two months ago my left ankle was hurting a great deal so I saw an orthopod who, after an MRI and wearing a boot for a month, recommended flat foot reconstruction surgery.

 

As many of you know, he said the recovery would be severe -- the first three or four months he said would be the worst.  He didn't think I'd be able to play tennis ever again, but he did say there was an 80-90% chance it would be successful in eliminating the pain of walking.

 

I can walk with some amount of pain, but it isn't excruciating.  However, it does severely limit how MUCH I can walk.  We used to spend the day at Disney World, and now I'm lucky to have more than 30 minutes or so.  The odd thing is it hurts more with the boot than it does with just my tennis shoes.

 

The surgeon said my foot was among the worst he has seen -- he does about 30 of these a year, and couldn't easily find another one to show me that was this bad.  He will have to saw (yipes) my heel bone in two, lengthen some other bone inside my foot, possibly use my toe tendon for repair (while I have not torn my tendon I have stretched it a great deal in one place) and in general slice and dice my foot up.

 

I'm retired and my wife works four days a week, so I do have some degree of support at home (just not those four days in the daytime).  While I'm a *bit* scared of the pain in general I tolerate pain a great deal.  However, the whole surgery thing worries the hell out of me.  Even in this long life I have yet to have anything this extensive (well, I did have back surgery to remove my L4/L5 back in 1985, but I was considerably younger then and the recovery wasn't nearly as bad as I was up on my feet the next day).

 

Any support or ideas or just commiserating would be appreciated.  Right now the idea that I need to put myself though all this just to get some walking back and STILL not play tennis again is VERY depressing.