November 20, 2007

And then there was one. . .

I arrived at physical therapy today expecting to be set back again; but that didn’t happen. I increased my leg lift weight up a pound and did them without a problem. I was able to do my quad sets without a rolled up towel underneath my knee. This was the first time for that. I was excited about that alone.

When I got off the table for my weight-bearing exercises, I was able to move all of my weight onto my left leg and lift my right foot off the ground. My PT’s eyebrows went up a bit in surprise. He asked me if I could stand on my left leg and bend my right leg at a 90 degree angle, totally lifting my foot off the ground. I could and I did. I held it for 10 seconds. I did it again.

He asked me if I could do it without holding onto the table, and I did it eight more times. I wasn’t completely stable. I wobbled a bit inside the knee joint, but I concentrated on squeezing my leg muscles tightly and that seemed to help. My PT exclaimed "AWESOME!" and told me I could ditch a crutch.

One down, one to go. . .

I rode the bike for seven minutes, added five more pounds to the leg press machine, and then moved on to some new exercises. During the last set of the new exercises, that awful wobbling inside my knee happened and it shot pain throughout my knee again. I gasped.

My PT heard me and asked me if what I had been trying to describe to him had happened. It had. He told me that hopefully, those incidents will occur less and less as I get stronger and feel better. If not improved by the time I see my surgeon, my PT said my surgeon will probably scope my knee to take a look to see if it really is the torn ACL causing me the pain and problems or if I maybe tore my meniscus a bit or am just having issues with a floating foreign body or scar tissue.

He said that frequently, people go into surgery thinking they’re having their ACL reconstructed and they come out of surgery having only had their knee "cleaned out" or a small tear that didn’t show up on the MRI repaired instead. Sometimes, people wake up, and as they thought, they have had an ACL reconstruction. My PT said that if the surgeon does scope my knee, and nothing else is going on in there, he’ll probably reconstruct the ACL, but if there are other issues, he might just leave the ACL alone.

So, we’ll see. I have a little less than three weeks of physical therapy left before my appointment. I made great improvements today and only having to use one crutch is a nice little gift. I can’t wait until I can say, "and then there were none."

***The latest review is up at The BBM Review. If you were curious as to how the new Super Mario Galaxy Wii game is, then you don’t want to miss it. Keep watching in the weeks to come because The BBM Review will be giving away some prizes!