Update on my leg

JAS Splint
I got my JAS splint last Wednesday afternoon and have been using it for a week now. The representative for the company came at the end of my PT appointment last Wednesday and spent an hour and a half, fitting it, showing me how to use it and taking me through my first full session with it. I used it once a day for a few days, twice a day for a few days and today will be my first day of three sessions. Actually I didn't use it at all on Saturday, but more on that in a bit.

So far I'd say it is going fairly well and it isn't nearly as bad as you might imagine looking at the picture posted in my previous entry. It's a little hard to put on myself and pretty uncomfortable around my thigh are the worst things I'd say about it so far. As long as I follow the instructions that the rep. gave me it isn't painful. The idea is that you do six five-minute progressive static stretches. I crank the ratchet until I start to feel the scar tissue stretch and then stop. I wait five minutes and then assess whether the stretch has intensified, stayed the same or decreased. If it is worse I back off, rest a bit and then re-crank until I start to feel a stretch again and do another five minutes. If it is the same I wait another minute, without backing off. Hopefully it has decreased at the end of five or six minutes. If it has I crank it a little further and hold there for another five to six minutes. So in thirty or forty-five minutes I've gotten six good stretches.

So now that I'm up to three sessions this takes two and a half to three hours of time blocked out each day for the JAS Splint in addition to the two hours worth of "normal" PT exercises that I still do each day. So rehab is just shy of a full time job, so its good that I'm still on medical leave or I'd never have the time to do all of this.

Overdid it this Weekend
Friday night was our Relay for Life (not too late to make a donation if you wish to) and we had a great time as always. It was extremely hot when the event started at 6PM and even though I wasn't able to walk around the track any where near what I have done in years past I was up and around on my crutches a lot more than most days. I helped run the live auction this year by manning the sign up table, recording the winning bidder number and price and acting as cashier at the end of the auction (a job that I could do sitting down). I walked the team lap at the beginning of the relay and walked around a good bit during the luminary ceremony. The relay lasts all night and ends at 6AM, but I didn't stay all night this year. I went home at about 1:30AM this year because I had a youth group event scheduled for 8:30am on Saturday.

Our team ended up as the second place fund raiser this year and nearly surpasses our team totals from the last three years combined!

So with five hours sleep I headed down to the church to supervise the youth who were scheduled to work with the Sweat Equity volunteers. I didn't have many options, but the first day of summer for the youth was apparently not a great day to choose. Only two from our group showed up, but they were a big help and we got a pretty big section of the basement floor poured in the house that we are renovating on the church property. My job was filling a bucket with water to be added into the cement mixer with the concrete. Still even with a seated job I found it hard to stay put and ended up traipsing all around campus and on my feet way more than I should have been. I stayed until about 2PM. The heat, the lack of sleep, the amount of time I spent on my feet Friday night and Saturday morning took its toll on me. By the time I got home I was spent and my leg was throbbing. I had lunch and then crashed. I slept right through Hillary's speech and missed the last leg of the Triple Crown. I did no exercises and didn't use my splint at all on Saturday. This was the first day that I've skipped completely since my PT began. I awoke on Sunday to find my leg still aching and the rest of my body screaming for more rest too. I decided that I would forgo church services and give my tired muscles and injured knee time to recuperate.

Therapy This Week
It was 96 degrees on Tuesday when I arrived at therapy to see a sign on the elevator door in the lobby that said "No Step Down Patients, A/C is broken." (Step Down Patients are those that come in to use the equipement on their own because they have graduated from working one-on-one with a therapist. So they were trying to limit the number of bodies generating heat in the office.) When I got to the thrird floor, I found the lights off and portable fans everywhere. Honestly it wasn't half as bad as I expected. But my therapist had gone home early so another therapist was going to work on me. Amanda is the new director of the PT Department who just moved here from California. She told me that she was doing an evaluation on a new patient, so I should do my exercises and she would work on my leg at the end instead of the beginning of the appointment. I wasn't that happy to think about the painful pushing on my leg happening after my exercises instead of before as usual. So after I went through my routine and Amanda finished with her other patient she comes over and says "I've been waiting for a chance to see what I can do with this knee." (She's the one who suggested the JAS splint to Jessica). Then she ups the ante even more by saying "I'm a bit more aggressive than Jessica." Not exactly words to make me relax. She was pretty effective though and managed to get my knee to bend to 70 degrees. She noticied that my knee cap wasn't moving much and showed me how to work on it to loosen it up since that is a crucial part of bending. So I've been doing that a lot. She also took the last bit of relaxation in my appointment and turned that into 10 more minutes of torture...I mean productive time working on my knee. I now spend my last 10 minutes of the appointment with ice on my knee also strapped to the table leg just like I do with the heat for the beginning of each appointment.

Jessica was thrilled to hear that I got to 70 and she and Amanda took turns pushing on my leg and discussing technique at my Thursday appointment. With Amanda leaning across my lap to keep my hip from coming off of the table (and after each had taken a few turns) Jessica got my leg to bend about 80 degrees. They didn't actually measure it, but they both agreed it was at least 80, maybe even 85 degrees. We were all three very pleased, but man it was PAINFUL.