How you gonna R if your legs won't run?
I've been intending for ages to write up another entry covering where I am in the great Knee Injury Saga. This is principally for my own future reference, and I don't recommend it for your reading entertainment.
The short version: I'm recovering from the surgery, but considerably more slowly than hoped/expected. I don't have a particular timeline for when I can expect to be back in going order. I am mildly fed up ;)
The longer version... Contains the odd icky bit...
My expected timeline post-surgery was to be starting on a two-minutes-per-day static bike regime at 2 weeks, moving to an elliptical machine at 8, and starting running on a treadmill at 14. It's currently 11 weeks since the operation, and I have not yet graduated to the elliptical.
Once I was over the enforced couch potato stage post-surgery, I felt I was making reasonable progress. I couldn't initially manage my two minutes of static biking, because my knee just didn't bend far enough (however high I cranked up the seat) so the physio stood me down for another week or so. Then I discovered that going to the gym to do two minutes is a colossal waste of time, and bought a static bike for a tenner from eBay.
I started walking about a bit, and then it all went a little wrong, my knee (almost down to the size of my normal knee) ballooned again and things got very painful. The most likely cause of this is my hamstring having torn where the graft was taken, so I scaled back the walking. A lot.
By September I was sort of starting to make progress once more, but the physio (a stand-in while the real one was on holiday) seemed unimpressed so I tried upping the walking stakes again.
Then my nicely-healed scar went a bit... odd. Bumpy. Then very bumpy. Then the bump burst, and then another bump formed. And my knee hurt. A lot. I rang NHS Direct to see if it was fine to wait the couple of days until my 8-week check-up, or whether I should make a GP appointment for the morrow. NHS Direct, bless their panicky little hearts, wanted me to head to A&E immediately. Several calls later I'd spoken to a doctor, and agreed a GP visit tomorrow would be fine.
By which point of course, the rather spectacular green pus (and the cavernous holes it left behind) had all calmed down and begun to look rather minor. The GP swabbed the holes to send off to the lab, but didn't think it looked serious. The consultant confirmed that this happens sometimes - there are internal stitches which are intended to dissolve quietly over three months. Sometimes the body rejects these, and boots them out in a spectacular manner. (I had, apparently, three of these deep internal stitches... I am still waiting to see whether the third is going to put in an obvious appearance.)
On the downside, Mr Consultant didn't have any useful advice or explanation for why I appear to be healing so slowly and painfully. On the upside, of course, this means that there is nothing wrong. My knee joint is sound, the grafted ligament is strong and stable, and really it's just a matter of waiting around until it heals.
I talked it through with substitute-physio the following day, and he pointed out the excessive (by which I mean 30ish minutes a day, slowly) walking was probably a mistake. My old enemy the vastus medialis obliquus muscle needs to be in better working order before I do such radical things as walking about. In an attempt to encourage the muscle, he dug out a fearsome electrical device (a very small cattle prod, basically) and prodded it.
With the device turned up to 7 (out of 10) VMO refused to do so much as twitch. I think we made it up to 9, which was really quite unpleasant, before it gave in and contracted nicely.
Then I went on holiday, so missed a physio visit last week. In the interim, I've been working hard on the VMO-strengthening exercises, and managed to do a bit of walking while on holiday. Alternated with lazing, which seems to have stopped things getting too painful.
Mostly, I'm just getting bored of the whole thing. I resent the amount of time physio sucks up, I resent how tired I get (and how quickly). I'm sick of feeling useless and having to ask other people to carry things and do things. I still feel horribly guilty about how much ChrisC has to do for me (though he still hasn't grumbled once, bless 'im).
And yet I keep reminding myself that it could be a lot worse: I'm still expected to make a full recovery, and one day this will all be behind me. Eventually I'll be back dancing, running, and skipping lightly up rocky coastal paths without a thought.