On the Saturday, Feb. 27th, Matt headed out bright and early to play in the annual Pepsi basketball tournament. Pepsi employees from all over the state make teams, pick a charity to play for, and come to Lansing to play in this tournament. Matt was playing with his fellow Lansing employees.
I decided to be a good wife and go and support my husband, so Madison and I drove to Lansing to watch Matt play a game or two. When I drove up to the facility, I couldn't help but notice the ambulance in waiting parked outside. I thought to myself, the ambulance is probably necessary for a gym full of men who normally do not play basketball very often. I also had a little bit of a bad feeling this year, but tried to shrug it off.
When we arrived, Matt's game had already started. Matt was working hard, and doing well. At one point in the game, I was looking down, helping Madison get her puffs out of her cup, when I looked up and realized Matt was lying on the floor in pain. He had one leg outstretched, and the other one was pushing himself backwards across the floor.
Matt said he was running down the court when he felt like someone kicked him in the back of the leg, he looked around and no one was there. He then fell to the ground in pain.
After a few moments, I gave Madison to a girl behind me and went out to check on Matt. The consensus from the paramedics and his teammates was that he needed to go to the hospital to get it checked out. The paramedics asked where he wanted to go, "Sparrow, St. Lawrence, or Ingham?", Matt said, "U of M." (What a true blue fan!)
Matt took the ambulance to the hospital because I wasn't sure how I was going to be able to get him there by myself with a small child. I followed him there and called my parents to meet us at the hospital to take Madison home.
After we got there, his condition was pretty easy to diagnose, he had a torn Achilles tendon, and would probably need surgery. They wrapped it up, gave him some crutches, pain medication and told him to follow up with a orthopedic surgeon.
When we saw the orthopedic surgeon on Monday, he confirmed that Matt did in fact need surgery, and scheduled it for Wednesday at 7:30.
Matt had his surgery on Wednesday, but didn't even get into surgery until about 9:00 p.m., because of delays in the patients before him. Luckily, my mom and dad offered to have Madison spend the night at their house for the night. Matt's surgery went well, but the surgeon said that he shredded it pretty bad.
We finally left the hospital at 11:30 and began to drive home. It was cold out and poor Matt had shorts on. He was in pain, cold, uncomfortable, and hungry because he hadn't eaten in 24 hours. We stopped at McDonald's, and headed home. As we drove in the driveway, at about 12:30 a.m., we realized. . . Oh sh*&. . . we don't have keys to our house! We switched vehicles with mom earlier that day so we wouldn't have to move the car seat, and with our car keys, was our house keys! Our only real choices was to drive to mom and dad's house and get the keys and drive home, or just spend the night there. We decided to spend the night there, and slept on the bunk beds down stairs.
An Achilles tendon rupture takes a LONG time to recover. Matt has been off work since the incident and will be off work for at least 2-3 months. Initially this was a difficult adjustment for Matt and I. Matt was unable to get around without crutches and I was having to basically take care of Madison on my own. Last week, Matt got permission to ditch the crutches, and therefore is able to help out more around the house and with Madison, which has been really nice. Matt continues to recover... stay tuned.
