Week 9

Putting on my own shoes!

   
     Now in the middle of Week 9, I am feeling pretty sore, but pretty hopeful. I’ve been driving myself to PT every time I go now, which is less pressure on everyone in my family. Doing two sets of each of my exercises has been better than doing three sets, and that soreness that I described in my last post did calm down the following week. Now I’m sore again, because I’ve been given some more new exercises to do, and my body isn’t yet used to them. I’ve finally discovered a pattern to my post-surgery recovery. I make progress one week, feel really good, and everyone at PT thinks I’m ready to be challenged, and move forward with new exercises. Then the following week, since I’ve begun some new exercises and have been pushing myself farther, I get more sore and start to feel like I’m not making any progress and will have hip pain forever. Noticing the up-one-week, down-the-next pattern has helped a lot with my morale. Now I can understand what is happening when I feel way better one week and then worse again the next. So, moving into this week, soreness is mounting, since last week I felt a lot better. 

I’ve been doing some of my own deep tissue work in my hip joints, which at first made me really sore, but recently has been less painful. This is great, as it means all my hard work has been releasing some of the inflammation in my hip joints. And yesterday, when Brandon was working on me, he said my tissues felt better! This is excellent news! He also has been pulling my hip joints out of their sockets a bit, which has been a relieving and stretchy feeling. Greg has had me doing some light stepping up and down a step, as well as standing up and sitting down repeatedly in the gym. These motions are really painful, but they’re getting easier. And Greg put me back on the stationary bicycle, about a month after we tried it for the first time to no avail. This time was much better, and hopefully I’ll be less sore than that first time. 

I asked Brandon for some stretches I could do in order to start working on my flexibility as I work on my strengthening. He gave me four stretches to do (shown below), many of which are painful, but they feel good at the same time. I’m surprised at my level of flexibility, actually! I thought that post-surgery I’d be way less flexible than I am.