Physical Therapy Begins

I just got back from my second Physical Therapy appointment (first one was on Monday) and have been doing my exercises twice a day for the last four days and am seeing a good bit of improvement already. My therapist's name is Jessica and until I'm cleared to put weight on my leg she said we are a bit limited in what exercises she can give me to do. That being said, she's got a lot of ideas and she has assigned me 8 different exercises to do twice a day.

Monday she did some measurements on the strength and flexibility of my good leg and then took some comparison measurements on my injured one. She showed me four exercises and had me do a little bit of each one and then finished off the appointment with 10 minutes of ice on my knee. All in all a pretty easy first appointment for which I was grateful. She gave me a printout of my homework with descriptions and pictures of the exercises that I did and it wasn't until I pulled the paperwork out that night to do them that I saw the numbers of repetitions and sets that she had assigned me. So I'm doing several sets of each exercise and most of them I have to hold for 10, 20, or 30 seconds depending on what the exercise is. Her first comment when I took the brace off was "well it kind of resembles a knee..." She told me that the swelling was one of the main things that we had to take care of because all of the fluid and swelling is making it too cramped for my knee joint to function properly. She said that the more I exercise and ice my leg, the more the blood will flow and that will help to move all the fluid and "junk" out of my knee so the swelling will go down and I will be able to bend more. The benefits of this became extremely apparent today when she added some new exercises to my routine and she re-measured how far I could bend my knee.
On Monday she measured that I could bend my knee about 25 degrees (it was only about 20 the week before when Dr. Ove took the staples out). After four days of exercising and icing twice a day this morning I was able to bend it 48 degrees. The amazing thing is that none of the exercises that she had me do until this morning had me bending my knee. So obviously her explanation about getting the blood flowing to reduce the swelling was correct. Now my brace is set on 45 degrees and I have one exercise that deals directly with me bending the knee. The other seven are helping to strengthen the rest of my leg muscles and working to keep the blood flowing and continuing to reduce the swelling.
One of the therapist working with another patient told me that when she first started in PT that they used to put fractures like mine in a cast for 2 months. When they cut the cast off and made the patient start bending their knee it was absolutely horrible and she can still remember one lady's scream to this day. So that is why I'm not in a cast. They have found that the joint is much harder to work with when it has been immobilized for that long. So they use a brace and start working on the joint before the bone is completely set because it makes for a better recovery.