Physiotherapain

It’s funny how physiotherapy diagrams always manage to avoid showing the face. If they did, there would be a particular sort of grimace that the patient would need to achieve at the end of any ‘stretch’. The sort of expression that is generally reserved for watching a car crash in its early stages. If any medical textbook illustrators needed to know the sort of thing, I now have it down pat.

The illustration above is from a booklet I found on the web. I couldn’t do this with my good leg. On a good day. Clearly, I have discovered the Ilazarov physiotherapy textbook for ballet dancers. However, I do now have some of my own exercises to do. Perhaps not quite as impressive as the picture, but pretty spectacular for a chap who walks as if he has a rod up his bottom even when he is fit and well.

These exercises were the positives that I brought away from my visit to St. George’s yesterday. The negatives were a little frustrating. My release date has been knocked back another 6 weeks at least, as my leg is healing, but not desperately quickly. My consultant was extremely helpful, confidence inspiring in his obvious expertise, and supportive. Yesterday I would happily have traded all of this for a fly-by-night scalpel-jockey who was prepared to tell me that I would have the frame taken off within hours, and would be playing football by the end of the week. Even though I don’t really play football.

Physiotherapy is the way forward though. I don’t know if it will really make enough of a difference to justify the pain of trying to do aerobics with sputnik screwed to my leg, but I’m going to have to assume that it will. It does, of course, allow me to believe that I can play a part in my own recovery. Because after a while, it’s difficult to believe that the best way you can improve yourself is by sitting with your foot up in front of daytime television. Especially when an hour of the current morning schedule is filled with the hard luck stories of other poor buggers who have found themselves flung at the mercy of the medical profession.

In the meantime, Sarah has come back from her evening jog. She took up running at roughly the same time that I arrived on her doorstep with little functioning from the knee down. My evening will be taken up with fielding Sarah’s chatter about her running hobby, whilst a documentary about ballet dancers is on in the background. I might go into the kitchen to try a bit more physio. And there’s an open bottle of wine in there.