My Compartment Syndrom

About

What had happened - as fas as I could reconstuct it, I collapsed somewhere on the last 50 m of the race. In the hospital report stands, that I was about 10 minutes without conscience, before I was transported to the hospital in an ambulance with a pulse of still 140 per minute.

In the hospital my legs became thicker and thicker and the pain was unbearable, but nobody knew what had happened or what was to be done. So one day passed by, before I came to an orthopedical doctor. He looked at my leg, measured the intra-muscular pressure and less than 15 minutes later, I laid on the operation table. After about three hours of surgery on this day and some more time the next days, the tibialis anterior (right picture) had to be removed from my both legs because it had become necrotic - what means that it simply died because the circulation in this muscle had stopped because of a compartment syndrom.

After this intensive surgery and three weeks in hospital I had to learn to go again. The tibialis anterior is that muscle that lifts your foot against gravity. Without this muscle the foot tends to hang down at an angle of about 20 degrees which is very uncomfortable when you want to go. But our body seems to very flexible in such cases. After some weeks I gained strength in the remaining part of the muscles, especially in the extensor digitorum longus (left picture). It took some more weeks before I was able to walk without any orthopedical help, but now I can move my feet nearly as good as before. Sometimes it still is a strange feeling, because the brain has to forget about the old muscle movements and learn new patterns with the remaining muscles - but it seems to work quite well.

So - life is going on and at least I had the possibility to experience a swedish hospital...

Uwe.

Responsible for these pages: U. Zimmermann