Back from the big smoke

Don’t know what it is about the big smoke. Every time I go there my knee picks up a bit. Last Thursday morning I arrived my knee was horrible. Walking from St Leonards to Dr Crichton’s surgery my knee was hurting with every single step. It was torture. I saw Dr Crichton and he suggested I stick with the physio, I thought fair enough, perhaps Brad could tape it  differently to give me some relief. Dr Crichton said that he’d only do surgery if all else fails and even then there’s no guarantee of success, and it could make it worse. I asked him if I was a candidate for a lateral release. He said no, my lateral retinaculum was not that tight. He said that in lateral release cases you couldn’t get your finger in under the vastus lateralis tendon. So I took the tape off. I didn’t bother retaping it. I walked back to St Leonards with just the Cho pat strap on. The leg felt sort of tight, but the cracking and catching on both sides of the knee had settled as had the inflammation. I got to town hall, and while the leg was uncomfortable and tight, it did feel better than earlier in the day. I walked all the way to the Bot gardens book shop and back, and the leg really loosened.  The knee had me cursing a few times, but I had spent several hours on it and it hadn’t completely seized up on me.

I got back to the Mecure Hotel at Wolli Creek, and found that my online booking hadn’t been registered. They were able to book me in anyway, which was a relief. Because I was really looking forward to putting my knee up. I went swimming in the motel pool.  It was too small to partice very well.

I walked over to the shops and bought something to eat. The knee got very tight walking back to the motel. I was a bit firey most of the night and I kept stretching and doing exercises, squeezing the pillow and towel, my fists,  squeezing the glutes. I couldn’t stop. Fighting this knee injury is pretty much my life at the moment.

Next morning I woke up and did more exercises, I walked to Wolli Creek Station and the knee felt pretty crappy, tight and sharp, but still not horribly inflamed and catchy like yesterday morning. I had to go back to the motel and get Dr. Crichton’s letter. The leg actually  started to feel a little better. I walked all over town on it, and the futher I went the less likely it seemed to sieze up. It was a long way from happy, but it was leaning towards bearable rather than unbearable.

Eventually I got over to the physio on Macquarie Street. It was a nice set up. Brad saw me before my appointment two. I explained how the knee had been really, really, really good, and really, really, really bad most recently. How the tape had really helped in Perth and again in Sydney last month. How the humidity of Coffs had caused difficulty in the tape coming unstuck all the time. How I’d aggravated it doing exercises when the tape worked loose. He then looked at my knee, and examined it for pain and catching. I told him that that catching on the outside lower edge of the knee was causing me grief. He suggested two possible ways of taping it, one was similar to what I had been doing but adding a rotational component. There was another way of doing it, which he said he’d send instructions by email if the rotational tape didn’t work.  The he massaged the ITB and lateral part of the knee. He found a painful trigger point in the ITB.

Then he put the tape on, and asked me to go on a treadmill with bare feet. While he assesed the video of my gait, I was hooked up to a flash new biofeedback machine. My VMO was twice as strong as my VL muscle! This is good!  Brad was happy about that but suggested that I need to get the VMO to fire first for exercise to be effective.

The video of my gait showed that I pronate severely, and my left knee leans inwards and my thigh rotate inwards. He added arch supports to my foot and tried to get me to walk with my knee over my second toe. That is the  hardest thing to get right. Teaching yourself to walk differently after 45 years is a fundamental change. I think the knee was better today, certainly better than on Thursday.  I’m glad I went to see Brad, it was certainly worth it. It’s given me a bit of hope.

I voted at Town Hall this morning, and flew back this afternoon. I bought Fritz Leiber’s Our Lady of Darkness at the Galaxy Bookshop. I’ve been trying to buy this book for sometime now.  I liked his story “A bit of the dark world.” in a Lovercraft anthology. I picked up Lenny from the pet resort. The neighbours pet turtle had escaped into my court yard. The little boy next door said it was there. I picked it up and returned it to the father over the back fence. My good deed for the day.