Achilles Tendons

Like the rest of the NBA nation, I flinched when I watched Kevin Durant drop to the floor during the second-quarter of Monday night’s Golden State Warriors game against the Toronto Raptors.

Sprawled on the sidelines, he immediately reached for his right heel, an instinctive reaction that brought an instant diagnosis from the game’s color commentators.

They repeated the three words no NBA player, or any athlete or anyone on the planet, period, ever wants to hear.

Achilles. Tendon. Tear.

The injury is the bogeyman for any active person, requiring months of bedridden boredom, followed by painful rehab.

I know all too well.

Because I have blown BOTH (yep, sigh, both) my Achilles tendons, ten years apart, performing a decidedly amateur version of what KD was dong the other night.

Playing hoop.

The Achilles tendon is a strong fibrous cord that connects the muscles in the back of your calf to your heel bone, like the gristle you hit biting into the back of a chicken leg.

Rupture it and you leave your foot nearly dangling, without tendon connectivity to the rest of your leg.

It’s as terrible as it sounds.

I am not the most limber of men — never have been. I’ve joked that my body has all the movement of an ironing board. I’m a clown on stilts, unsteady, ready for the fall.

Touch my toes? Let’s start with my kneecaps and go from there.

Adding to my physical limitations is the fact that I’m impatient.

I mean, who has time for stretching when the ball is sitting there on the court, beckoning, just waiting to be shot? (But never dunked, because as the cliche goes, this white man can’t dunk.)

My first Achilles tendon break came when I was a senior in college. It was a spring afternoon following another long Buffalo winter and me and my boys were hooping in someone’s driveway in the student ghetto section near the University of Buffalo.

I stood facing the basket and dribbled once to set up my jump shot.

And then — BAM!

I thought someone had thrown a rock and hit me in the ankle; that’s the sensation most people describe when they injure their Achilles. I hit the driveway and called out to my best friend, who was standing nearby.

“Why did you throw a rock at me?”

The next day, I limped into the student newspaper on crutches, teased as a drama prince by the newspaper’s sports editor. But a test later that day confirmed what I’d dreaded: I’d torn, but not broken, my Achilles.

I was placed in a walking cast and told to go easy.

But, of course, I was 21 and indestructible.

I painted houses, climbed ladders, walked when I should have stayed home.

“Hey, who’s that fool on the dance floor with the walking cast?”

“Who do you think it is?”

I needed to heal quickly because my best buddy and I were headed to Europe for the summer in what we knew would be a hilarious season of fruit picking and drinking and carousing.

I couldn’t wait.

One day, about a month before our departure, my walking cast off, I was crossing a street near campus. A car approached a bit too quickly and I picked up my step.

BAM!

Again.

The emergency room doctor told me that this time I’d totally ruptured the tendon.

Then he stuck his finger deep into the breach to demonstrate to a cute young nurse, as I bit into my pillow.

“See?” he said, with a poke, poke. “This is totally broken.”

Looking back, I guess I deserved that.

This time, I would be given no walking cast, but a full leg cast that extended from toe to hip, making me feel more mummy than man.

I remember the day, laying in bed, when I had to say goodbye to my friend who was leaving for Europe, alone, on a trip that I, too, was supposed to take.

Did I cry?

I felt like it.

That summer was a hot one in Buffalo and as I lay in bed in an apartment without air conditioning, reading, going out of my mind, I could feel beads of sweat trickle down my leg, deep into the recesses of the cast, on stretches of skin I could not reach.

The doctor had warned me that , no matter what happened, I was NEVER to stick anything into the cast — say, an extended wire coat hanger — to scratch an itch.

I risked cutting myself and getting an infection.

But it felt so good.

And it was the only way to keep my sanity.

So I did the scratch, scratch, scratch and prayed again gangrene.

As the summer wore on, I sept less time in bed and hopped around my second floor apartment, including down a long stairwell to get the mail, making the muscles in my good leg Herculean compared to the atrophying muscles on the lame one.

I remember the day the doctor replaced my long cast with a shower one.

We looked at the puny sticklike thing that was my leg, all red and scaly.

He applied a coat of talcum powder to removed the dead skin and I almost passed out.

Not in pain, but ecstasy.

It was like a million little brushes scratching every real and imagined itch.

It was better than sex.

Really.

I finally returned to two good legs and resumed my life.

My friend returned form Europe with stories I could never share.

I tried to forget about my twenty-something rashness.

And then, almost ten years to the day, I was playing basketball with colleagues in San Diego when I went up for the same, lame, top-of-the-key jump shot.

You guessed it.

This time, I knew right away what I’d done.

I’d broken the other Achilles tendon.

I cried.

The recovery was slow, just like with the first break, but now I knew what to expect.

Being a man with two gimpy Achilles tendons has changed my life.

The tendons, unlike, say, many bones, do not come back stronger.

I was wary doing activities that required any sudden, staccato movement, like playing tennis, or leaving home plate on the dash for first.

My speed was now golf and cycling. And walking.

You still hear about Achilles breaks, mostly with athletes. And even if you’re Kevin Durant, you’re not a cyborg. Your body is fallible.

But when KD limped off the court, supported up by teammates, I literally felt his pain.

It’ll no doubt be a long summer for the world’s best basketball player.

Thank God for air-conditioning.

But, hey, KD, don’t listen to any of them doctors.

If you get too crazy-itchy, nothing, and I mean nothing, works like a good old wire coat hanger.

Better than any mega-contract.