mememe

Darned injury

Posted by Wynne Lock on

I don’t want to write about it but it forms a relatively large part of Life Right Now.

On July 10, Kiddo was out of camp and we went for a walk to the library. He brought a soccer ball to make the walk more fun for him and he egged me on to dribble some like him and I did for all of two minutes, dribbling it ahead and chasing to kick it again, in clogs and a t-shirt dress and I stepped on the blasted ball and freaked out and feel. I fell on my left hip and my fall was broken somewhat by the bag of library books. Grinning face with smiling eyes I was concerned I didn’t scrape myself up and I didn’t and we walked to the library with basically no issues (that I can remember).

The next day, I went to the office and walked home from the office (3 km) in the same cheap clogs and then it was on July 12 or 13 where I felt something wrong with my knee. I don’t even know how bad it felt at the beginning, how I could ignore it, or how bad it was when we went camping July 14-16.

At its worse I was encumbered as follows:

  • Bending my knee to slip into the car, use the toilet, after it being straight overnight was uncomfortable and if I needed to do it quickly, it was out of the question – it felt like it was locked at times and I had to brace myself bending it, like easing it
  • Stairs were negotiating only limping, taking it carefully like a toddler one step at a time because putting all my weight on one leg was out of the question. Also, it seems that when I’m going downstairs, I twist on my knee to take the next step and twisting on it was nothing something it wanted to take.
  • Walking: there was highly reduced flexion in my knee – if I tried to walk at a normal clip, you could still tell I wasn’t bending that knee and so it’s just easier to limp and keep it straight leg
  • Standing from sitting needs to be negotiated carefully in case my knee was not up for it.

I went to the office on July 18 and saw my dad and family on July 19 and other encounters with others than my immediate family put a different lens on how I saw myself. Not just embarrassing but that this wasn’t normal, I wasn’t healing “fast enough” and I would have to decline normal things I would do with the kids.

“Let’s see how much better I feel in a few days,” but finally I had a telemedicine with my GP on July 24 and had an in-person appointment on July 27. She assessed that I didn’t hurt my knee (not broken) or ligament and diagnosed a muscle strain/sprain and said I could see a physio if I wanted to.

My first physio appointment was on August 1 and he said that I have a sprained/twisted knee which totally makes sense since I roughly twisted my body and legs when falling to one side. He massaged my thigh alot because it was tight and gave me some exercises to do (squats, stand on the weak leg only, walk while kicking up my heels).

Since the appointment, I do start to walk normally and taking takes up is possible but labouring. I still don’t want to take stairs down and on the weekend I did something “stupid” which is that I was startled by someone and jumped back on my injured leg, too much weight and some twisting on it and doubled over swearing and feeling set back by a week (with some overnight rest, not really set back).

Besides not wanting to walk with difficulty, I did tell physio that I need to be recovered before travelling alone with the kids later this month.

We getting old and while I made an adjustment for more dental insurance and have always had decent prescription insurance, this injury required paramedical services and apparently I had ZERO on my plan. NPY has some thankfully and it’s a wake-up call on that front and other fronts to be in decent shape to not be sidelined by something so small again.

Update (August 16) – my second physio appointment was on August 9 and I demonstrated that my walking was basically back to normal and I laboured but could go up stairs. In the stairs exit near the clinic, I showed Matt how I going down stairs was a challenge, that my leg muscles (hamstring, primarily) were not fluidly letting me take the weight, twist slightly to plant my left foot a step lower. He massaged my hamstring and instructed me to do half lunges and to continue to squat and stand on one leg. Shoring up my proprioception in my ankle, knee and hip was accomplished with standing on one leg. My knee sprain was basically healed and my muscles need strengthening again.

Knowing that I am going away in 1.5 weeks and that I was thankfully close to recovery, he said he wanted to see me another time except when I remembered on August 11 to make another appointment, he was booked up for the week. Without doing a whole lot of lunges, I made progress anyhow and am just a touch sad to not check in with him with that, but that’s a $90 30-minute expenditure!

On this day..

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