4 week review

Another week down of recovering from acl recovery. I'm seeing improvement in a lot of areas, except for flexion. I saw my doctor on Tuesday and he said my knee looks really good because it is very close to straight. I told him my worries about the pain when I bend it, but he said not to worry about it because flexion will come back much easier than extension. So he gave me an exercise to do where I lay on a bed or table and lay my feet over the edge and put a weighted towel on my heel to force my knee to bend. It works really well because when I do that for 10 minutes, my bad knee is as straight as my good knee. And I got pictures of some x-rays of my knee. You can see the staples in my bone. Anyway, here's a list of the good and bad, like I did last week.

Good:
- No more trouble with sleeping at all. That is back to normal, thank goodness
- Done with all pain pills since I don't have any pain ever
- Scar is looking pretty sweet
- Hair is growing back from where the nurse shaved for surgery
- Extension is coming back and is almost back to normal
- I can walk around with no pain and I can walk almost normal
- Going up stairs isn't a problem at all, going down is another story

Bad:
- Hard to go down stairs, still have to take it one step at a time
- Still a significant amount of swelling
- I lost so much muscle and my leg is very noticeably smaller than my good leg
- Still have that sharp pain in the back of my knee when trying flexion
- Can't bike yet, which I should be able to do by now, but can't because I don't have great ROM
- I get fidgety when sitting for long periods of time

I think my progress is going slower than most people's, which is really frustrating because I want to get better so badly and it's really tough being patient. And I don't feel like myself when I can't exercise at all. When the doctor tells me it's ok to bike again, I'm gonna be so happy to have one form of exercise back.

That's all for this post. I'm gonna do one on Thursday, the 14th, for my official one month post surgery blog post, so you should probably read it.