Monday, November 07, 2005

Certain things you never want to hear out of your doctor's mouth. High on the list would be things like "inoperable" or "malignant." But in the context of an injury, I would propose that "uh-oh" goes pretty high on the list.

"Uh-oh" was what came out of my doctor's mouth today when I started describing how I injured myself on Saturday. I asked him why the uh-oh, and he said that the description sounded like a torn Achilles tendon. However, a quick feeling up of my lower leg showed that the Achilles was intact, as is the entire general knee area.

It turns out my self-diagnosis of torn/pulled/strained calf muscle was indeed correct. More correct than I knew, in fact--I had envisioned a hierarchy of muscle injuries where a tear was worse than a pull and pull worse than a strain, but it turns out "pulled calf," "strained calf" and "torn calf" are synonyms for exactly the same injury. Also the weird amalgam of advice and intuition I had been using to treat it were exactly correct. It'll hurt like a bitch periodically for a week, but no serious harm done.

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