The First Physio Therapy Session

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.

Getting Around in a Splint

So for the next 3 weeks I split my time between bed, sofa and laps of the living room to keep me moving. Walking on the crutches was slow and hard work. But it was the getting up and down that I found difficult as I was unable to get my leg from bed/sofa to floor and vice-versa unaided. I think this was partly due to the weight of the splint causing pressure and pain on my knee, partly due to the increasingly useless quad muscles in my bad leg, and partly due to the injury itself as a straight leg lift is virtually impossible with a fractured patella. I need someone to lift my leg whilst I turn myself around and then place it to the floor for me. I think someone needs to invent a device that will help with this, how people who live alone would manage I'll never know!

To make things worse, this was Christmas time! No shopping, no dining out, no cinema, no pantomime! I did manage to get out on Boxing Day though, after a family effort to get me into our car. This involves putting the front seat flat, lowering myself down onto the seat, having someone lift my leg from the floor whilst I slide my bum up the back of the seat far enough to be able to turn my leg into the car and then lower it down into the footwell. Quickly place a pillow under my leg to support it, raise the seat again and off to go! .... Yes, driving is a long way away yet!

Moshi Monsters checking out my splint

Pamper time!
Getting a foot massage

Out and about on Boxing Day
(that's a wafer sweet by the way, not my knee cap poking out of the splint)