Thursday 24 June 2010

A Breakthrough, or Breaking Point?

Lot's of things to write about since the last post. World Cup has started, Queens has started and finished and Murray went out...booo! Wimbledon next. I'm catching up on all the sports viewing that I've missed out on over the last 5 years. Back to work too, albeit from home until I'm walking again.

About ten days ago I was doing my range-of-motion stretches on my knee to get it bending more. I put my brace to checking the angle and there was a big release of pressure from the area around my PLC graft at the outside of my knee. The angle went from 75° to 85° and to be honest, I really crapped it. At the same time I started to feel a bit ill. I checked the area where the graft is and it felt much squidgier than before; I managed to convince myself that I'd torn the graft by pushing the ROM too far. Shit!!!

Next day I phoned the physio who thought I should come in to get it checked, depsite the fact I was probably being a total hypochondriac. I was, it was fine; all I'd done was push through some adhesion between the graft and something. So, it really was a breakthrough and not breaking point!

Over the next few days my ROM steadily increased at about the same rate as my muscle deacrease. I'm trying hard to do all the physio but my quads, calves and glutes are shrinking rapidly.


And some notes from the next few days:


Day 33. Hit 84*! More Weight bearing, no problems.

Day 36. First day back in the office. Knee bent too long and not propped up. Got home, bit swolen. Lot's of ice. not much improvement in bending, 85* ish but gets there pretty easily. Almost full weight bearing, hopefully off the crutches on wednesday.

Day 38. Physio. Allowed to progress to full weight bearing, brace unlocked to 90*. Bit of pain under kneecap doing quad mini-squats. Chuffed :-)

Some motorbike racers have been using hyperbaric oxygen therapy:

http://www.bikesportnews.com/news-detail.cfm?newstitle=ELLISONS%20START%20HEAL%20THE%20RIDER%20FOUNDATION&newsid=5827

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