....I think that for hard runs and contact sports at a good level nails have to be removed.
Hi Tartar,
I would like to add some notes on the following two items related to nails:
1) Is it possible to feel normal while on nails? or is it that no matter how strong and fast your recovery has been, you would not feel a 100% normal until you have removed the nails.
You know I had a painful distraction phase, therefore this journey was certainly not easy for me. I cannot imagine how I would survive the first few weeks post-op and also the whole distraction phase, without painkillers and the rest of the pain management I did.
With that level of pain, and given that everyone, including Dr. M. told me that life cannot be a perfect normal with the nails, I had prepared for a full recovery in about 1.5 years when I'd remove the nails. However during the consolidation phase I realized I might have a chance on a much faster recovery.
I have no medical background, but I used my finance and engineering knowledge to look at the process of recovery as an optimization problem. My goal was to minimize the recovery time to "normal" (with a definition of "normal" that I have posted on this page and before).
There are several hard constraints, e.g., nails should not get bent, and callus should not get fractured. There are some soft constraints, e.g., LDL cholesterol should not rise too high as a result of including a lot of meat in my daily diet; but I am willing to let it rise for a while so I can gain strong muscles and callus.
To not violate the hard constraints, I lowered the intensity of some of the moves such as running, but added to the duration of exercises and kept adding to the duration almost on a daily basis. This was mainly to avoid pushing the nails into bending or callus into fractures. E.g., instead of running very fast, I have done jogging at 30% of max speed I can handle, but I do for long distances and that for today was running for 3.8 miles nonstop but with a low pace, while yesterday at 3.3 miles.
My theory was to make muscles so strong to overpower the nails, to a level my body would not be able to feel the nails at all. Since I experienced extreme callus growth during distraction, I figured I could continue the same diet to hopefully get extreme callus growth during consolidation. Around month 5, I finally started to feel that my legs are strong enough to overpower the nails. No matter what I do (jogging, walking, swimming, sleeping, driving, etc.) my legs feel so strong, as if I just had a one hour swim, and that helps me have no feeling of nails.
I have therefore proven to myself that it is quite possible to get back to a 100% normal before removing the nails and that happened staring Day 150+ post-op.
2) Is it possible to compete while on nails?
Unfortunately I am not a pro athlete who has competed and won medals. But it would be great to see a pro doing something like I did and experience a fast recovery and then see if he or she can compete say by month 6 or so. I understand it seems impossible, because people talk about consolidation and hardening taking months, blah blah, but after seeing item (1) above and proving to myself that things can get back to normal by month 5, I would not be surprised if someone in the future proves that even item (2) is possible.
Finally I would like to remind us all the CLL recovery is not a racing competition. We don't wanna push our bodies to a level that we would create complications and never recover from them. Recovering in 1.5 years is still better than having to deal with complications for the rest of our post CLL life. We therefore better listen to our bodies and adjust the level of intensity and duration of our exercises and also plan for our diet.
It's like a tradeoff. The more we push our bodies, the higher the chances are that we violate the soft and hard constraints, mentioned above. Obviously we should not violate the hard constraints. We should also consider a high cost for violating the soft constraints.
I hope this helps.