I got my cast removed today and the doctor said I don’t *have* to use crutches anymore!  Unfortunately, I can only bend my knee 15 degrees and it takes me a full 20 minutes to stumble-hop 200 yards.  So the road to recovery apparently goes down before it goes up…

First, they sawed off the cast – and let me assure you that lying down and having someone you can’t communicate with whip out an electric saw to use around your infirm leg is NOT the best way to start the day.  Then, I could try to bend my knee…and sweet mother of all things sacred, the pain was terrifying.  It was physical and psychological, and two worked synergistically.  Physical: At about 15 degrees of rotation, my knee feels like a rubber band stretched too far past the fraying point (painful).  Psychological: My knee isn’t supposed to fucking feel like that at any degree of rotation, much less 15! (what the fuck!)

The doctor called it “spontaneous healing,” and today he finally explained it with enough clarity that I understood.  My “medial ligament” completely ruptured when I fell, so it was something like 2 frayed ends of ligament floating around in a bunch of fluid (the source of swelling).  In such cases, you can’t perform surgery because its difficult to locate and safely remove these ends to reattach them.  However, sometimes, those frayed pieces sorta drift near each other and kinda start regrowing into each other, almost haphazardly.  So, we put the knee in a cast so it doesn’t do much work, and see if those frayed ends of ligament can find each other again.  That’s what has happened in my knee.

So what I have in my knee now is a huge lump of bodily tissue that is technically a ligament but didn’t exactly develop to support a functioning knee.  And now I need to work on building up the muscle around it to support it, then stretching it so I can bend my knee more than 15 degrees. 

In the meantime, pain and patience.  The following is a list of creatures that can now beat me in walking race: cockroaches, gerbils, 3-legged dogs, pigeons hopping along the ground, and crawling babies.  I think I have a decent shot against a slow turtle, and I can still beat a slug. 

Soon, I will tell you what my work has been like, and hopefully I’ll have some pictures (believe me, you wouldn’t want to see any from today anyway).