Please Keep Trying!

After going to the doctor three weeks ago for my diagnosis for Leftie, I left with a prescription for three weeks of physical therapy. The physical therapy, aka, PT, took up about forty five minutes of my day twice a day. The goal was to strengthen my quadriceps so they would lessen the unevenness created from my injury in July.

Every single day I did my PT, sometimes once, sometimes two or even three times. I even started doing my therapy with weights. I went to physical therapy twice a week which sucked another hour outta my day. There wasn’t much time to write during the day, what with driving to and from PT, doing PT, going to doctor’s and such, so I had to work through dinner and into the evening, which cut me off from all sorts of activities.

I improved some, but when I went back to the doctor on Monday, he checked me out and declared, “There’s still no muscle tone.” Huh? Excuse me, but I do my PT, I don’t shirk it even though it hurts like a mofo. Apparently, the physical therapy script he wrote wasn’t tough enough and combined with my atrophied muscles, it didn’t do diddly. I was po’ed, massively, po’ed.

Anyone who knows me, knows I work my butt off in whatever needs to be done. It’s an attitude which became pretty adamant during my weight loss: If it needs to get done, just do it, sans complaining and whining. Who cares if it hurts? Just do it, get it done with and move on. But I did do it, and went the extra mile with it but it still wasn’t enough. I feel as though I flushed X amount of hours and cash down the drain. This wretched knee problem has caused everything in my life to hover in a holding pattern of suck, including my weight loss, which irritates me beyond words.

So now the folks at the PT office have devised a new way to torture Leftie. They strap electrodes to my atrophied muscle and run a strong current to the quad which isn’t firing, enough to make it contract on its own. Then I go through all my exercises, which are much tougher now, with my muscle contracted. It feels like crap. It feels like some phantom has reached its corpsey fingers into my leg and is yanking my muscle.

I get to do this fun exercise for three more frick’n weeks. I hope to god this pays off, because frankly, I can’t afford any more wasted days and money. Either this works and the knee problem “lands” safely, or it runs outta gas and takes a header into the sea of crappiness it’s been flying over the past eight months.