One thing about life with small children, and toddlers in particular, is that there’s just no hiding what they really think about something. Obviously, as we grow up, it’s probably for the best that we learn to filter the public expression of those feelings but the one thing I absolutely love about this age is that they make it very clear when they don’t want to do something - something, as adults, we should probably do a little bit more.
Following my last update when I reported on the frustration with the PGP physio and problems even swimming/walking (what else is left exercise wise after they’ve gone?), I’ll admit that I had a bit of a ‘grown up’ temper tantrum about it all and basically went on physio strike for the rest of August. I’m a big believer that sometimes (NOT often!), we all need to just acknowledge our emotions and wallow in them until we’ve got them out of our system and are ready to come out fighting again. This has been one of those times.
I had my follow up appointment last week and was totally honest about my lack of ‘compliance’ and the reasons why. Give the physio her due, she wasn’t funny about it and was actually really supportive so I will now feel very guilty if I don’t do better this month!
Having taken on board the increased problems I’ve been having the day after doing what seem, to me at least, to be basic physio exercises, she’s taken them down another notch so we really are experimenting with how much I can do and trying to build from there.
At the heart of it all is the relationship between the kinetic chains that have developed to ‘control’ the ACL knee and the impact they are having on my postpartum pelvis. The muscles along my spine (I forget what they’re called) that connect the ribs to the pelvis are crazy tight (or ‘hanging on’ as the physio put it), along with glutes, IT Band and adductors - all apparently compensating for the wobbly knee. While I’ve had what I thought was just a tight IT band since the RevACLr surgery, apparently there’s a lot of scar tissue still around the macintosh scar, which also isn’t helping.
That’s one of the biggest challenges with this whole process - knowing what’s ‘normal’ and what isn’t post ACLr or RevACLr surgery and what can/should still be corrected. Also, I often don’t ‘feel’ the tightness in the muscles that are compensating for the wobbly knee day-to-day - it has effectively become ‘normal’ - but when the physio presses gently on them, boy are they sore where the corresponding muscles on the other side of my body are not at all.
One things for sure, once I got home after having everything ‘loosened off’ again, I really did feel like one of the skeletons in the Funnybones books and I’m sure this must be the best time to start the basic physio - building new movement patterns on top of the ‘straightened out’ base - before the ‘wrong programmes’ take over again.
All of which made last week a terrible time for the family to be hit by the return-to-school V&D bugs that do the rounds at this time of year, effectively wiping out any ‘spare’ minutes to crack on with it. Hopefully I’ll get a clear run in from here. Scar massage, shoulder bridges and prodding the VMO again, here I come…
In the meantime, the knee scores on the doors for this month are as follows:
OKS - 36
CKS - 52
IKDC - 59.8
I’ve started dropping these into a graph to show how they’ve changed over the course of the pre- and postpartum timelines - just need to figure out how to get them to show the relative timelines between measurements correctly then I’ll upload with my next update.
Oh, and I've added a link to a really in-depth blog on flexibility in gymnastics to the resources page today from SHIFT Movement Science, including an interesting para or two on 'curing' bent legs and ACL injuries. Check it out here.