A Brief History of My World

For those of you who are not familiar with my colorful surgical past read on. The rest of you can wait on bated breath for my next post.

I've had more surgeries than an 80 year old with a heart condition. My scars will win any contest and I know more about my innards than I sometimes care to admit.

I'll spare you the early years and skip ahead to my early twenties. I presented to our team's sports doc with shortness of breath. I was getting overwhelmingly tired during practice and noticed that despite my conditioning I was breathing much harder than usual. I was diagnosed as having exercise-induced asthma and was prescribed a myriad of medications and inhalers. Of course this was a misdiagnosis and none of the meds worked. Follow-up visits turned into fishing expeditions peppered with blood work, image scans, and various tests all negative. Our frustration grew and I began to notice extreme fatigue and tightness in my calf muscles. This was nothing new but due to the demands of D1 training I decided it deserved a mention. On a whim, my doc suggested we take my distal pulses before and after workouts just to see what would happen. Lo and behold I had normal pulses at rest and diminished pulses after practice.

This, of course, was not good.

I was instantly referred to the greatest vascular surgeon ever and put through another battery of tests. I was diagnosed with a rare condition called Popliteal Artery Entrapment Syndrome, or PAES. I will try and dig up a picture of my angiogram showing 100% occlusion from the popliteal space down on BOTH legs. No wonder my legs hurt! The radiologist who performed the angio told me I would never run again. My surgeon's colleagues said my case was inoperable. Luckily, my surgeon was just as stubborn as I and was determined to fix me good as new. The first operation was an exploratory endeavor where he freed up the space around the artery by shaving off a good portion of the medial attachment of both gastrocnemius muscles. Having surgery on one leg is bad enough but imagine trying to get up and walk around on two post-surgical legs. It was months before I regained full range of motion and was comfortably able to run again. I say comfortably because I was actually up and doing something that resembled running shortly after surgery. I recall weaning myself off all narcotics within a couple days because I was worried the NCAA would give me a drug test and I would fail! I continued to run and compete until...

The pain returned.

Another round of tests and a visit with my surgeon showed my body was quite good at adapting. Too good, in fact. The attachments had grown back even bigger than before! In a normal person regeneration is good. Not so in my case! The decision was made to operate again, this time completely severing each attachment. This meant I would forever have weaker calf muscles but this outweighed the alternative. More rehab and learning how to walk, this time with the disadvantage of less muscle mass and stability in my joint. I give major props to the PT and weight room staff at the U for inventing creative ways for me to rehab and train.

Once again, the pain returned.

This time the cause of the occlusion was difficult to determine but something had to be done. Onto bilateral popliteal bypass. This was by far the most difficult surgery in terms of recovery. I had 4 scars on my right leg (2 from the bypass and 2 from the harvest of my GS vein) and 2 on my left making movement extremely difficult. I also had extensive nerve damage which took over a year to heal. Rehab was especially difficult, both mentally and physically but once again I prevailed and was up and running in no time. The year was 2002 and I had managed to successfully run 5 years of D1 track as a scholarship athlete despite everything.

It is now 2008 and I am training for a marathon. The pain has returned, once again, and I am faced with another bypass surgery and rehab. The graft in my left leg has failed and the graft in my right provides minimal blood supply at best. My surgeon is a good sport and he is still stubborn as ever and told me he will do whatever he can to fix this thing.

So that's my PAES story. It's not over yet. I am requesting visitors bearing gifts especially funny cards or letters, episodes of Scrubs, and egg-free cookies while in the hospital so get your ovens ready!