Ruptured Achilles Tendon

[augustg]

Hi All,

I ruptured my left achilles tendon this week playing basketball.

I go in for surgery tomorrow and apparently I have months of recovery to look forward to and will not be able to dive for 8 months or so...very depressing.

Any suggestions on activities that will keep me sharp for diving when the time comes again to get wet? Suggested reading, courses of study, exercises?

Peace,

Aug

 

[TSandM]

Well, you could do the book part of a Nitrox course. Or you could pick up Clay Coleman's Certified Diver's Handbook, or Lippman & Mitchell's Deeper into Diving (that's a great book to learn more about decompression algorithms). Or you could spend a lot of time on line reading Erik Baker's papers on M-values, and on Ross Hemingway's site learning about VPM. Or you could watch cave-diving videos . . .

 

[Damselfish]

Educational reading sounds good. For another sort of fun there's always novels, like Shadow Divers if you haven't read that yet. Or dive related movies you haven't seen yet.

You could get Nitrox certified period, PADI no longer requires dives and I think most of the other agencies don't either. You could take any other specialty courses that don't involve actual diving, though Equipment is the only one I can think of. Some of the conservation type/fish courses might not require diving but might not be available in your area either. (I would normally say there's not much point in taking classses like that only for the sake of doing it, but if you can't dive why not.)

If you don't have a first aid/CPR certification, take EFR (maybe towards the end of your dry spell) if you think you might want to do Rescue sometime soon, and your ankle is up to mucking around on the floor doing CPR. It's a good thing to do no matter what. Likewise, you could read the Rescue manual. (Your ankle will have to be back in pretty good shape to actually do the Rescue class.)

You could spend lots of time cyberdiving on Scubaboard.