April 8th Flexibility

This is how far I can move my ankle as of April 8th. I'll upload a new video every week and hopefully I'll notice some improvement.

Do It Yourself Physical Therapy

Physical therapy is in some ways worse than recovering from surgery.

Here I am with a relatively pain free ankle. Sure, I can't walk, let alone move my foot or toes. But the ankle, for the most part, isn't bothering anybody. Then comes along physical therapy. Of my own free will, I move, stretch, and bend my ankle just enough to get my pain to a four. In the end, my ankle is sore and it's all my fault.

When I was recovering from surgery, the pain was always there but I wasn't doing anything to cause it. I just sat there and the ankle hurt. The ankle and I had an understanding. There was no need to move it to cause pain. I'd sit there doing nothing and it'd hurt.

Like I said in an earlier post, I have 10 million exercises I have to do every day, sometimes more than once a day.

This one is called the ankle four-way. It's pretty straightforward. I rest my ankle on a small stool and move it left to right and up and down. I do 2 sets of 20 repetitions once a day. The left to right movement is essentially impossible for me right now.

I just started laughing when I read this one. I'm supposed to move my foot in clockwise and counterclockwise circles. As soon as my foot goes into this position, it turns into a sausage. I'm supposed to do 2 sets of 20 a day. I can do zero sets at the moment.

This exercise is also easy to understand. It builds the muscle on top of my shin. I have to do 2 sets of 20 three times a day. I'm at zero.

This is an important exercise if I want to restore my calf muscle to its former glory. However, my toes don't quite bend like that yet. Not surprisingly, I'm at zero sets when it calls for 2 sets of 20 three times a day.

This is a toe intrinsics exercise. While I'm supposed to do 3 sets of 10 repetitions a day, I can't do any until my toes work.

This exercise allows you to move like a snake on the floor using only your feet. It also strengthens your ankle by using your other foot for resistance. I must perform 10 sets of once a day, holding the position for about six seconds.

Once a day I'm supposed to push my foot against a sturdy pillow.

Then I squeeze the pillow to death. Once my ankle is back to normal, this pillow is dead.

Here I think I'm supposed to push my foot against a crowbar. I haven't purchased a crowbar yet.

These last two exercises are probably my most important right now. They involve loosening up my toes, particularly my big toe. One of the unfortunate things that happened in surgery number two was that all of my toe tendons were pulled apart to gain access to my bones. It felt amazing.



All of these exercises require a ton of motivation. Every single one of them hurts. It takes me about an hour right now to do all of them. What I'm hoping for, though, is to see and feel progress.

Leg Update

Yesterday was awesome. I felt great all day. I had slept perfectly that night. I don't know if I've reported this yet or not, but I'm no longer fighting a fever. By reducing the medications I've been taking, both the fever and nightly sweats have been eliminated.

So this is basically my routine. I rest, ice (or bag of peas), compress, and elevate the leg every day and night. It doesn't really change that much. Sometimes I try crutching or wheelchairing out in the hallway for exercise.

Oh! We did just install a new Nerf basketball goal. It's the best!

Here, you can see me about to make another 3-pointer. Guarding me, a little too closely I might add, is my dog, Spunky. I'm using my gimp ankle to hold her off. And, ready for the Alley Oop, is my wife, Brooke. But that's just in case I air ball, which I didn't.

Last night, for some reason, was just awful. Sleep was hard to come by. And this evening was a little brutal with respect to pain. We've been weening myself off of the pain medications, and unfortunately, due to the pain breakthrough, we had to un-ween myself temporarily.

We had some visitors earlier today, and I felt fine while they were here. I don't think it had anything to do with them, though I'd love to blame one of the shorter visitors. By the way, for those of you participating in the visitor competition, updates will be made every Saturday.

While these moments have been happening since the first surgery, they do start to become less frequent and less painful. That's great! I can tell they're getting less frequent. I would like to go a few days, say four or five, without another breakthrough pain day. That would be awesome.

I'm healing, I think. I'm getting better and actually looking forward to getting my staples out. I'm even starting physical therapy on April 2nd.

I'm sure it's going to be extremely painful. I'm really looking forward to it.

During my next doctor's visit on the 23rd, I'm going to ask for permission to drop by work for a few hours just to say hello and get some of the pranks out of the way.

But, like we found out during the last visit, The Closer means business when it comes to my leg. He worked his butt off fixing it, and he doesn't want me to get so impatient that I do something stupid and set myself back months in healing.

He's got a point. But I really want to find out what my new nick name is at work.