Physical Therapy - More Shocking Than Ever
Today was my second day of physical therapy and it was exciting. The first thing that was different was the electroshock therapy. The therapist has a machine sort of like this one with two wires that connect to these sticky electrode pads. He then placed two of the pads on top of my leg, one near my thigh and the other above my knee. The goal was to get the electrical stimulus to force my quadriceps to contract. After having surgery and a lot of swelling, he explained that you have to retrain your leg muscles how to work.
Once the electrodes were in place, he began slowly increasing the voltage and told me to tell him when I felt something. At first I felt a prickling feeling like tiny pins and needles. Exactly how you feel when your first notice that your foot is asleep. He then kept slowly turning it up until my muscle started to contract. It was pretty weird to see my muscle just contract, but neat at the same time. The electricity by this time was more intense, more like when your foot is completely and painfully asleep, but it wasn’t excruciating or anything, mostly just an odd feeling.
He set the machine to run through 10 second cycles. It would send the voltage to contract the muscle for 10 seconds, then be off for 10 seconds. During the 10 seconds it was on and my muscle was contracting, he told me try and do a straight leg raise. With his assistance and the contracting muscle, I was able to do 15 of them.
The straight leg raises that I thought I was accomplishing before were not actually the correct way to do them. Rather than lifting my leg with my quadriceps, I was using a combination of my other muscles to lift my leg. He told me that when you have an inactive muscle group, your body will figure out a way to adapt to try and do what you are telling it. In my mind my goal was to lift my leg, so that’s what I accomplished. However the real goal should have been, contract my quadriceps and use that muscle group to lift my leg.
Following that he had me do some weight shifting exercises. To do these you stand up with all of your weight on your good leg. Then you slowly shift some of your weight to you surgical leg, hold for a few seconds, and shift back. I feel like I was able to support about 20-30% of my body weight on my other leg before it started to hurt.
Finally he hooked me back up to the electrodes, only this time he used 4 electrodes attached around my knee, and the machine was set at much lower voltage. He then put an ice pack over that and had me sit for ten minutes like that. The purpose of this was to alleviate pain. It felt great. This technique is called TENS and was my favorite part of the therapy.
At the doctor’s appointment they changed my dressings again and said that I could probably stop using the CPM. He also said the next week I’ll probably get my stitches out. He also gave me a refill of medication. Finally, he told me that it was now safe to allow my knee area to get wet. This means I can bathe without having to carefully wrap my leg in a plastic bag.
When I got home I called the cpm people and they sent someone to get the cpm around dinner time. It was a little sad to see it go, we had spent so much time together…
Filed under: ACL Recovery
Leave a Reply