{"id":161,"date":"2011-07-16T00:22:09","date_gmt":"2011-07-16T00:22:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/?p=161"},"modified":"2011-07-16T00:22:09","modified_gmt":"2011-07-16T00:22:09","slug":"day-10-friday-may-6th","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/?p=161","title":{"rendered":"Day 10 (Friday, May 6th)"},"content":{"rendered":"

This morning I did the full count of all my exercises.\u00a0 20 Heel Slides; 1 minute Hamstring Stretch; 30 each of all three<\/em> leg raises; 5 minutes Passive Extension; 20 Knee Bands with 1 second pause; 20 Knee Bends with 1 second pause; and a full 1 minute of balancing on the involved knee!\u00a0 It\u2019s one of those mornings where I love physical therapy.\u00a0 Funny in a way because\u2026<\/p>\n

Physical Therapy Hurts!<\/h2>\n

When I First started doing my pre-hab, I couldn\u2019t even believe the things they were asking me to do.\u00a0 My knee had really become stiff while in the immobilizer.\u00a0 The first thing to do was regain flexion and extension.\u00a0 Flexion was accomplished by doing \u2018heel slides\u2019 where you sit on the ground with your leg out comfortably in front of you.\u00a0 You hold a towel or strap in both hands, loop it around your foot, and pull, flexing your knee as much as it will go.\u00a0 That hurts\u2026but it also kinda feels good; inevitably the knee flexes more with each slide.\u00a0 Sure you backpedal for the next session, but in aggregate your knee keeps flexing more and more.\u00a0 In my case, it felt as if the muscles and tendons had settled into odd positions during the immobilization and now as I was working to get range of motion back they\u2019d \u2018pop\u2019 around.\u00a0 It feels gross, yet also in an odd way it feels good.\u00a0 I was also dealing with a LOT of swelling; I could feel the fluid moving around to get out of the way of the flex.\u00a0 That, too, felt weird, sometimes felt wrong; ultimately it felt good too.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s always one exercise that is your least favorite.\u00a0 For me it was \u2018passive extension\u2019.\u00a0 Seems easy, right?\u00a0 Put a rolled up towel under your heel, lay down and just relax<\/em> your muscles.\u00a0 Let gravity do the work.\u00a0 My goal was to do this for 5 minutes.\u00a0\u00a0 The first time I tried to do it I thought I would cry after 30 seconds.\u00a0 I started sweating.\u00a0 I just could NOT convince myself to un-clench my muscles.\u00a0 Now keep in mind that my injury was a knee hyper-extension.\u00a0 All I (and my muscles) could think of was that if I relaxed my knee would just hyper-extend again, an awful feeling.\u00a0 My physical therapist had me modify the exercise so that the towel was under my knee at first.\u00a0 I would progress to no towel, then to towel under heel.\u00a0 It took a long time to get there, but I did make those transitions over the course of about 3 weeks.\u00a0 Now that I\u2019m in rehab I think Passive Extension is one of my favorite ones (It helps the hamstrings).<\/p>\n

Physical Therapy & 1 week Surgeon Consultation<\/h2>\n

IT feels a bit lopsided going in on Wednesday and Friday for physical therapy.\u00a0 Still, I managed to make some strides between the two days.\u00a0 Having the greatly reduced leg pain means that my stamina is on the rise; Adam decided to have me start walking around as much as possible with a single crutch and no immobilizer.\u00a0 He also gave me one new exercise, Step ups; and modified my knee bends so that I do a 3 second pause at the bend.\u00a0 He had me drop the weight shift.\u00a0 There was just enough time for me to do a 10 minute icing on the \u2018game ready\u2019 before heading upstairs to meet with Dr. Fetzer.<\/p>\n

When we got upstairs and into our room, I found out that the stitches were coming out today!\u00a0 The student nurse took off all the steri-strips, pulled some of the stitches, and cut the exterior off others that will dissolve.\u00a0 She then put on a new batch of steri-strips.<\/p>\n

Once that was accomplished, Dr. Fetzer came in to see how I looked, and to generally talk about the surgery etc.\u00a0 He said I was looking great and that I could stop wearing the immobilizer to sleep!\u00a0 This is big news because that thing is very uncomfortable for sleeping.\u00a0 He also told me to get my normal step back and get off the crutches ASAP, which matches Adam\u2019s plan for me.<\/p>\n

Then we talked about the surgery.\u00a0 He brought up arthroscopic photographs of the whole thing and talked us through it.\u00a0 All of my menisci looked great given my age (they have some wear and tear) the ends of the Femur and Tibia joints were in good shape too.\u00a0 He showed us where he\u2019d \u2018mowed the grass\u2019 clearing up some ragged cartilage and such.\u00a0 Then he showed us the drill holes in my Tibia and Femur and the anchors and the tendon that will become my new ACL.\u00a0 We have copies of all the photos but it was great to have him explaining it all to us.<\/p>\n

Finally he asked if it was OK to do one more X-Ray to see how everything had settled.\u00a0 I said, of course!\u00a0 He then showed us on the X-ray where the anchors are.\u00a0 And with that the meeting was over.\u00a0 I go back in 5 more weeks for the next follow-up appointment.<\/p>\n

Evening Physical Therapy<\/h2>\n

I was pretty tired by the time I did the evening PT, but managed to get through it all, new stuff included.\u00a0 I\u2019m really looking forward to getting completely off crutches, they are fairly uncomfortable and my right underarm is complaining a bit (yeah, I crutch incorrectly sometimes when I\u2019m tired).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This morning I did the full count of all my exercises.\u00a0 20 Heel Slides; 1 minute Hamstring Stretch; 30 each of all three leg raises; 5 minutes Passive Extension; 20 Knee Bands with 1 second pause; 20 Knee Bends with 1 second pause; and a full 1 minute of balancing on the involved knee!\u00a0 It\u2019s […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[4],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=161"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":203,"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/161\/revisions\/203"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=161"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=161"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/greg.lyonkingdom.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=161"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}