Warning: Graphic Images

On March 24, 2010 I broke my foot during MMA training.  This will be the first post of my recovery journal.  If you're curious how this happened, I found a video where the same exact move happened to this person during a fight.

At the hospital, it was discovered that I had sustained a Homolateral Lisfranc Fracture and spent the next 3 days there, and had surgery to try and fix the mess that was my foot.  All 5 of my metatarsals were dislocated and displaced with heavy tendon damage.  When I had first arrived at the hospital, nobody actually believed that I had broken my foot, since my shin guards were covering my leg and foot.  The nurse kept asking me why my soccer shin guards were slid down to my foot.  I kept telling him they were kickboxing shin guards but he had no idea what I was saying.  He kept wanting to just yank it off, but as anyone who's worn the cheap fabric shin guards, knows that it's incredibly hard to pull off after training even when you don't have a broken foot.  Anyways, I insisted that he cut the shin guard off, and when they took it off and saw my foot then they took me serious.  I snapped this picture with my phone at the time:

I went to get my x ray done and when they came back, now there were 3-4 nurses around me and 2-3 doctors.  They wouldn't believe that I was just doing MMA, since they said that usually injuries of that sort take alot of force and they've only seen it in car accidents.

Aside: The Lisfranc injury is named after the French surgeon Jacques Lisfranc.  It was common in war for horsemen to fall off their horses and their foot would be caught in the stirrup and they break their foot.  Lisfranc discovered the joints in the metatarsal and he found that he could amputate the foot quite easily by cutting between theses joints.  It was said he could amputate a foot in less than 5 minutes.  Needless to say, I was honoured to have sustained an injury named after this upstanding man.

Anyways, after the surgery, I had 3 pins in my foot as you can see in the banner in my xray.  I was in a hard cast for 2 months and a walking cast for one month.  Here's a picture taken after I took my hard cast.  It certainly looks straighter but it was swollen and looked like a tube of toothpaste.

I was anxious for a speedy recovery so by the time I was in a walking cast, even though the doctor told me not to, I was walking around without crutches.  I can't remember how long after the walking cast came off that I started to walk normally, but I think it was around the 6-8 month mark that I felt like I could start to go back to BJJ class and practice technique and stuff. 

It's been over a year, and I just started to feel a bit confident with my foot.  I didn't do any physio, because my doctor said it wouldn't help, and I think it had something to do with why my range of motion of my foot was so limited but at least it wasn't hurting to walk around.  Last night, I was rolling with someone and I had his back and I didn't even have my ankles crossed.  But he decided to try and ankle lock me anyways, and coincidentally he went for the injured foot and torqued it in the same direction that I had broke it.  I let out a scream and felt like a wuss right after, but I knew I had pulled something.  It's in quite a bit of pain right now, and I'm limping around but I really hope it's nothing serious.  I'm thinking that I should listen to my coach and not the doctors anymore and go to physio.  I'm sure physiotherapists have seen all kinds of injuries and they'll be able to help a bit with strengthening up the tendons and working on my range of motion. 

The lisfranc is a dreaded injury in sports, being common in football.  Usually it happens when a player is on the ball of their foot and someone lands on the heel of their foot.  When that happens it's a season ender usually.  When I got it I searched the internet everywhere, looking to see how people's recoveries from this injury were like.  It certainly didn't look good, with most people saying after 1-2 years they still couldn't walk normally.  I'd like to think I recovered better than most, and hopefully this gives people a little bit of hope when they sustain this injury.  I think a lot of it had to do with the fact that I didn't try to avoid using the foot.  I cycled right after getting my cast off, snowboarded, worked out and tried doing rehab on my own.  Although I realize now that I had overlooked certain parts of rehab, I strongly believe that I can recover quickly if I tried.  So don't let the doctors tell you can't do something.  If you have enough dedication to something and the willpower, I believe the body has tremendous healing capabilities and there's always ways to continue doing what you love.