Day 73 - Alex's Rehabilitation

Alex and I are getting very familiar with the physical therapy needed after total knee replacement and the process of recovery. His first two surgeries were in Virginia where his recovery involved climbing lots of stairs as the bedrooms were on the top of three floors, the dining room on the middle floor, and the TV on the bottom one. As a result, I don't recall him getting around so much in the earliest days of his rehabilitation. When his physical therapist came to see him in Virginia, he would head upstairs to the bedroom where Alex spent more time resting than he thought he needed, but probably not as much as he should have, and the two of them worked on the exercises together. When the therapist left, Alex did the exercises on his own. I don't know what exercises he did then because he didn't need my help.

This time, however, is very different. Because of the extent of the repair needed to the knee, Alex is not supposed to lift his leg at all. But he still needs to strengthen the muscles in his leg. That means that each of the exercises his therapist here has given him require that I help. I lift his leg so that he can get strength back as he lowers his leg down to the bed. With a pillow under his knee, I raise the lower part of his leg to extend the knee joint and he lowers his heel down to the bed, to regain flexibility in the joint. With his leg flat against the bed, he extends his foot to point his toes and then bends his foot back toward his knee and I give his foot just a little extra push to stretch out his calf muscles. My arms are getting a pretty good workout as well. And I know that he is doing all of his exercises every day because I'm doing them, too.

toddler image by glenmcbethlaw, via Flickr

In contrast to our Virginia home, the whole house here is on one level, and that means Alex is almost unstoppable when he gets up to move around. Observing Alex getting around with his walker is good practice for when our grandson becomes mobile. I can just see the little guy in one of those wheeled chairs with the round tray in front and attention-grabbing colorful plastic thingies (that's a Geordie word, the equivalent to thingamabob) that rotate or make noise that allow pre-toddlers to get around before they can walk. Alex's walker makes about the same noise as he rolls it along the hard wood floors. So long as I hear a steady noise from it, I know he is making good progress. If I hear the noise start and stop, I worry.

One comparison with a toddler that doesn't work quite so well, however, is that toddlers try to do what they haven't been able to do yet while Alex needs to refrain from trying to do everything he used to be able to do until his knee allows him to bend down again.  He is so stubborn that he refuses to ask for help. Even when I offer help, he doesn't wait for me. And he just can't give up his compulsion to clean up every surface in sight. My explanation - which he hears as an excuse - is that I can't be everywhere at the same time doing both what I need to do and what he wants me to do. Something just has to wait. Alex is determined that it not be what he wants, so in the absence of my doing the laundry or the dishes or picking up a glass from the coffee table in front of the TV just as soon as I have finished drinking from it, he does those things. Occasionally he will apologize that he can't do something for me, like carry my dinner plate to the table, when I never expected him to do that in the first place. He has never made me feel that he does things for me because I am incapable of doing them for myself. He does things for me because he wants to; it's his job, he says.

Today is his ninth day at home after the surgery so he has begun to venture out without the walker. Even with a cane, I consider that his stealth mode. Unless he starts dragging his leg behind him, I can't hear him moving around. It is a good thing that I am usually in the same place for most of the day - at my computer for the eight hours I work Mondays through Fridays and then still in the same place while I complete my day's project. I don't want to round a corner and run into him, something that is entirely possible since he is in places I don't think he should be going yet, like the laundry and the garage.

Yesterday he went to the back yard and saw someone working on the neighbor's yard. He asked the guy if the lady next door was OK because he hadn't seen her for a few days. The guy said she was fine, but she was in the house recuperating from knee replacement surgery. And wouldn't you know it, Alex told him to tell her that if she needs anything, she should just call him.