30 December 2011
Four weeks and four days after my surgery I went to meet my physio therapist for the first time. The session took over an hour and was bascially an assessment of how things were doing. We chatted about the details of my accident and injury and then she took a look at my leg. With the splint removed I felt very vulnerable. My leg felt weak and the muscles in my thigh had shrunken down to almost nothing. She was very gentle though and worked with me to build my trust and confidence as she started by gently running her fingers over my leg and progressing to very gentle massaging movements around my knee. The tissue around my knee had hardened in places and she showed me how to massage it slowly with lotion to start to losen it. Despite doing lots of foot flexes over the weeks, I wasn't able to flex it back far enough to her liking so she showed me how to exercise this to improve and strengthen the range of movement in my ankle. She needed to check with the consultant how much she was allowed to push my knee, so for now, she did a couple of test flexes ... which revealed a rather dire Range of Movement (ROM) in the joint, almost zero in fact! She showed me another exercise for my quads and checked how I was walking with the crutches to make sure my posture was ok. I got the ok to open the splint myself at home for washing, massaging and exercising my ankle and quads.
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