PT continues. - week 5

this week i had PT monday sept 12 and weds sept 14.

monday - tried getting all the way around on the bike; still not happening. chris stretched me. quad sets and straight leg raises (still 3 lbs) with e-stim. leg hangs. terminal knee extensions with the green band. flexion stretch with a bunch of pushing by chris to get me to 85 degrees... this still hurts a lot - i probably turn into a beet because it hurts more to breathe than not breathe, and finally i had to say, "chris, can we stop now?" she was just waiting for me to say when. i got in the hydrotrack and walked for a bit at about the same speed as before. when i was doing underwater squats, i could feel something weird (not too painful - mostly uncomfortable) happening in my knee on the lateral side both when bending down and coming back up. if i were to put a sound to the sensation (which was in and of itself sound-less), i would say "creaky." it felt kinda like something was catching there both ways. hmm. calf raises felt fine. then we did some extension stuff - heel on the styrofoam roll, weights on my quad near the knee. chris later added another weight on my shin. nice. also quite uncomfortable. with this i feel like i get a lot of tightness and some pain on both sides (more on the medial side) of the patella. pain in the patellar tendon area, too. awesome. i was at PT for 2.5 hours this time.

wednesday - i still can't get all the way around on the bike. stretching. quad sets. straight leg raises - 3 lbs. this time for extension, chris just put my heel up and started pushing down on my knee. she did it twice. made my leg straighter i guess, and it was a shorter duration than monday when i was hanging out with weights on my knee. for flexion, chris pushed me to 90. she figured that since she wasn't going to see me until after the weekend, this would be good for me. it didn't feel any better than monday, and once we got to 90 the intensity didn't feel like it was decreasing after holding it there for a bit... i'm definitely ready for this stage of PT to be over. i didn't get to walk underwater today - there wasn't enough water in the tank. but i did squats and calf raises. they felt fine. none of the creakiness that i felt last time. i was only there for 1.75 hours this time.

the scabs are gone now - i think it happened tuesday. i should start posting pictures. the scars are still really stuck, and the surrounding skin is taut because of it. chris moved my patella around a bunch this week - one of the days some scar tissue crunched away. that was a cool/odd feeling.