PT, Round 2

I went to my second Physical Therapy session today. Today's started with an ankle strengthening machine. This thing is REALLY cool. First I put my foot in a metal thing that is rather reminiscent, actually, of the foot-measury things that are at the shoe store. You know, the one where you stick your foot on the metal thing, back your heel up to the heel-cup, and slide the metal levers around until you find out that you wear a size 6 or whatever? Like that, only without the metal levers and the foot measury number things. And it had straps that went around my shoe. And spots for weights at the front, back, and both sides.

So the first thing he did was to put a 5-lb weight on the front and see if I can flex and lift up the weight. Yep, no problem...20 reps. Same with each side. The one exercising the OUTSIDE muscle of my leg was the worst. He said that's normal - even on a "good" leg it's the weakest muscle of the ankle. Well...good, I guess.

Then he put it on the back. 5 lbs. was easy...and so was 10, so he put 15 lbs. on that one. No surprise, he said, because the calf muscle is so much larger and stronger than the other ones. Then on to a gait-exercise between two parallel bars. Walk between them, using them for support, frontways and backways. He said I'm not doing bad, but I do need some work yet. Then a stepping exercise, stepping up on the bad leg, and back down (again with the parallel bars for assistance if needed).
Then....a bike ride? Yep, 5 minutes on the stationary bike! Yay! I can go bike riding again! (Only, given the fact that MY bike has much greater resistance than that one does, I think I'll wait a bit longer before trying it.)

Then stopping for some additional flexy exercises that he did on my ankle, trying to increase the range-of-motion. Not bad, he was rather pleased with the ROM I had so far.

Kev mentioned "hey, you'll be able to drive in no time if you keep that up," and the Therapist said I could try it NOW, actually, if I felt comfortable with it! So we tried it in a relatively empty parking lot, and I tried all the usual things: accelerating, braking, and I even had Kev do a couple "emergency stop" sessions, where I'd be driving along and he'd say, randomly, "NOW" and I was supposed to slam on the brakes. Everything went well, so I got to drive home. Actually, I took over all the driving from Sam's Club (had to do some shopping) to the library, then to the grocery store, then home! Ankle's all swelly and stuff, but it doesn't HURT.

I got to drive! I'm still not up to doing any marathon driving sessions - it did start to ache after about 15 minutes or so driving, and I had to take a break (fortunately, stopping at the library and the grocery allowed for that) and now I have a freezy pack on my ankle to try to get the swelling down a bit, but I got to drive. I'm so happy!