My surgeon wants me to have pre-hap, that is, to go to physical therapy and work on the strength and flexibility of my knee before my surgery. My insurance will pay for it as well.
*SIDE NOTE* Yes, it concerns me to be going anywhere public right now. The infection numbers in the small towns close to us are scary. Since I still have what I consider my part-time job of risk assessment/management, I had to make the decision whether or not it was still safe enough for me to go. Fortunately, the facility has good air flow, they’re really serious about wearing your mask, and wearing it correctly. If you don’t have the right type of mask, they’ll give you one. And you will wear it. So that makes me feel slightly better. If I could avoid going at all, I would. However, I think it’s better for me to do the PT visits at this time. *END SIDE NOTE*
The good news is that I have good flexibility in my knee. According to the physical therapist, what I currently have in terms of flexibility is what they’d like to see post surgery.
Fuck that shit.
I explained that I’m going to achieve the same flexibility in the bad knee as I have in the good knee. Then I showed her how far I could bend the other knee. She said I’d have to work at it, and implied that it was possible. Particularly since that was where the knee once was.
I don’t have a lot of flexibility exercises that she wants me to do, but I must do some.
The bad news is that I have no strength in my bad knee. I discovered that it’s shockingly weak. This is not good.
So this morning, I started to adapt my current “yoga” program to include some of the strengthening exercises that the PT gave me. The exercises are uncomfortable. I don’t enjoy them. I will do them every single morning, though. And some of them I’ll repeat at night, cause I’m like that.
I ordered ankle weights. I’ll be doing leg lifts with them, once or twice a day. I’ll use them now for pre-hab, as well as later, for rehab. I don’t know if I’ll continue to use them – I may. They’ll probably end up living next to the pedal machine.
We need to get to a Goodwill or equivalent and pick me up a pair of crutches. The PT wants me to come in with the crutches for my next visit so she can adjust them to fit me, as well as give me lessons in how to correctly use them going up and down the stairs, etc.
This weekend I abused my knee pretty badly. I had a lot of standing up, squatting down, and kneeling. After I finished with the abuse, I did the right things, like took a hot bath, iced my knee, stretched it, etc. It actually recovered fairly quickly. I’ll be doing a lot with my knee the next few weeks due to construction. Can’t be helped. I’ll baby it when I can.
And that’s it for the current state of the knee.