Day 67

“Where have you been?”, you’re probably not really asking. Well if you hypothetically must know, I’ve been waiting. Waiting for some significant event to occur on this project. Surely, one would think, there would eventually be some clear indication of progress or sudden improvement in my condition - an event transpired, a milestone reached. In short, something worth writing about. Right?

But as seventeen days have gone by since my last post, I am now beginning to realize that I have officially entered the slow burn part of this process where progress cannot be measured on a daily basis – maybe not even weekly. It’s not that I’m not improving, it’s just that I am now doing so at the same hypnotizing pace as my insurance company’s claim processing effort. My progress has been so slow in fact that phrases like “probably permanent” and “as good as it’s going to get” are beginning to creep into my subconscious.

In general things are going well, although when I walk my knee now sometimes snaps and cracks like a mouthful of pop-rocks and occasionally when I bump it just right I involuntarily drive my fingernails deep into the nearest solid object. I’m still regularly reminded of the sciatic nerve but even when I do feel it, the pain is mostly mild. In fact, my knee is almost pain free at this point unless I run it up against either end of the range of motion where things quickly turn excruciating. Before the injury my range was about minus 7 to 150 degrees - essentially, from slightly hyper-extended to a full heel to butt bend. Typically I now have about 5-125 degrees available, but with a generous bit of teeth grinding and profanity I can push it to about 0-140. In PT it can be pushed adequately into hyper-extension. But if I’m not regularly moving it to the limits, even the typical range rapidly tightens up.

Functionally, the last few weeks have actually been excellent. I’m still doing thirty minutes every day on the bike, now at 60 rpm and with moderate resistance – enough to make me sweat for the first time in well over a hundred days. Last weekend I strolled around for hours with my family and a couple thousand other fish fans at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. And I voluntarily hiked to the car afterwards, which turned out to be a mere eight or ten blocks away, the natural result of my resourceful father’s determined search for free parking. The next day I went swimming. We’re not talking laps or anything but just the act of aimlessly swimming around was amazingly fulfilling. It was the first time since Christmas day that I had felt almost uninjured, almost normal again. And yesterday I walked my oldest daughter home from first grade. There are no words that would nearly begin to describe what it means to me to once again be able to make that little trip.


I also had another session at the Stone Clinic PT facility yesterday. The new trick on the rehab agenda: Squats. Sensing my need for reassurance of progress, Thor, the maharishi of PT, pointed out that this is the first time I have been even close to physically ready for the squat. He suggested that we are all born with an innate sense of perfect squat form. (A premise you’d be inclined to agree with if you’ve ever seen the common squat stance of a two year old, feet firmly planted on the floor, butt hovering within an inch of the ground.) But somehow as we age we begin to lose our form – as well as our natural ability to cry our eyes out and laugh uncontrollably in the same five minutes, but that’s getting a bit off topic. If you were somehow able to convince an average adult to perform a squat, you would undoubtedly see their knees immediately start forward as they initiated the descent. Their butt would remain centered under the torso until the bottom of the movement where they would begin to resemble the lesser known yoga stance, “pooping dog”. Giving equal time to the other popular domesticated pooper, Thor also refers to this as “cat box-ing”.

With this in mind I called on my inner toddler as I retrained myself in proper squat form. And I tried to stay focused on Thor’s squat form rules:
1.) Feet comfortably shoulder width apart, angled out 30 degrees.
2.) Knees over ankles throughout the movement.
3.) Send the butt out first. – This is really the key to the squat. As soon as the butt goes backward the head moves forward to balance compensate. This gets things going in the right direction and allows the descent to occur while the lower half of the legs remain reasonably vertical, thereby minimizing the potentially damaging sheer forces experienced by the knees.

After a few trial runs I was able to get very close to a full squat (butt lower than the knees) before shooting pain across the front of my kneecap sent me tumbling to the floor. I’ve still got plenty of work to do, but my newly found squatting abilities were both surprising and encouraging.

I guess the short of it all is that my knee is slowly getting better. Even if too slowly. I am both tremendously tired of being injured and also quite confident that things will be much better next month, and even better still the month after that. And as it's been from the beginning, that belief alone is still plenty enough to keep me going.