ACL Surgery: 3 week report ..

So its been a bit more than 3 weeks since i had my knee 'fixed'. I had my first PT (physical therapy) appointment at the 3 week mark. Seems like I'm progressing quite well and have got a fair amount of flexibility back. Did not lose a lot of muscle strength in the quads / calves since i was not out for too long and have been fairly aggresive on stretching and walking and putting load on it etc. My PT, Brian, gave me a a pretty good post-op exercise worksheet, which i'll put on the next blog post (since i could not find anything good on the web).

I've started taking long walks up and down the hills of San Francisco. Can pretty much go for 90 minutes (with a small coffee break in between) with no significant issues. Also, I can walk as fast as the kids which is a big step forward :) The kids school had a walkathon yesterday. I walked a few laps with the kids and also jogged a bit. Jogging is a bit more difficult, but i suspect it streches the skin and flexes the knee more than walking. So will incorporate this into my daily PT exercises. There is still some amount of swelling around the knee, but this is normal and will be around for the next few months.

Its quite wierd how the knee flexes differently in different directions. Sitting on my bottom, in can pull my knee quite close (125 degrees or so) towards my bottom. However lying on my stomach and trying to bend my knee (hamstring curls), seems like i can just bend my knee a wee bit past the 90 degree mark. mari had a good idea of flexing my toes while doing it, which would get me a few more degrees. Maya helps me out quite a bit and does most of the exercises alongside me and is very curious about what each exercise does etc.

We've been swimming once a week and that seems to help too. Our latest swimming find is Hotel Nikko which has a nice warm pool (86 degrees) and is quite reasonable ($10 / adult, kids are free). This find was due to an excellent blog post in the chronicle. The kids are becoming pretty good at climbing at Mission Cliffs. As an incentive, i've promised to get the chalk bags when they can climb 5.4 and climbing shoes when they climb 5.5. I hope we'll do a lot of outdoor climbing this summer (along with some rafting and lots of biking). I was able to belay the kids with my brace in week 2 and did not need the brace last week. I'm hoping to start climbing in the next few weeks