PT is A-OK

I'm SO happy to be at PT! :) Lucky for Nancy (and me) I liked her at my appointment on Friday, so I could cancel my waiting list position with the other physical therapist and stick with her.

My appointment on Friday was great.  I had to go through the whole story of my knee, for the millionth time, for Nancy, and she laughed at my list I'd made of activities I wanted to accomplish (see previous post).  After some discussion, we decided that 'Swim/Bike/Run' could be grouped with all of number 3 as 'sports', and she added 'climb stairs' to my list.  Her reasoning was that it was going to take awhile to get to the 'sports' on my list and she wanted to add something to my list we could actually make some progress on sooner rather than later.  I told her I was cool with that, as long as she realized that I wanted to *eventually* get back to doing everything else on the list :) Friday's appointment was all an evaluation, getting some baseline numbers and checking to see what I *could* do and what I needed to be able to do.  Nancy eventually got out the range of motion (ROM) measure-er and I found out the number I'd been waiting for, 119 degrees! I think I've mentioned it before, but during my last surgery it took me quite awhile to get past 90 degrees.  Rehab this time around is going pretty darn well. :)

I had my second PT appointment today and was pleasantly surprised that I'd made some progress over the weekend.  I'd gone out of town and 'babysat' my 12 and 14 year old cousins and didn't do as much icing or exercises as I'd done in past weekends.  However, I was still able to gain a couple degrees of motion, I moved up to 125 degrees! My 'good leg' was measured at a max bending of 135 degrees (I think), so that's the target number that I'm hoping to match after rehab.  Also, when my good leg is straight with a towel rolled up under my ankle, allowing for some natural hyperextension, my knee gets to -5 degrees, so 5 degrees past horizontal.  My repaired knee was measured at +2 degrees, so not quite completely horizontal (yet) :) Today I learned a couple new exercises for strengthening and got to RIDE AN EXERCISE BIKE for 5 minutes at the end of my PT session!! Wahoo!!!!!! I was also given the go ahead to jump on the bike to loosen up before subsequent PT appointments.  I've got to learn to ice my knee more when I'm at home and keep reminding myself to do my exercises, but overall I'm pretty happy with my progress!

Thanks for reading!!!