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MACI Procedure Recovery - Day Five

June 26, 2018

I again slept through the night and although my calf is still really painful it is very much bearable.

Today is the first day of physical therapy and I am excited to get in and ask about what I can do to relieve the pain of my calf.

After breakfast it is time for the CPM again. I am surprised by just how much easier I am able to move around on my crutches. While my wife is feeding our kids I actually set up the CPM on my own and get myself strapped in. Of course my wife is livid that I did so but after calming her down I tell her that I want to be able to push myself, within limits, and to see how much I can do for myself so that she has more time for the kids. I'm as invested in this recovery as anyone and won't do anything to jeopardize it but at the same time I'm very independent and don't like having to be looked after. She understands and only asks that I not push too hard. Six hours later and I unstrap myself, put on my leg brace and put away the machine. It feels really good to able to do this stuff on my own.

It is now time to head to the physical therapist and I am so ready to get in there and learn about what I can do to speed up this recovery.

The therapist is a really good guy and when I ask him about my calf he immediately knows what to do to help me relieve the pain. He suggested several stretches that made a huge difference. Intuitively I knew what would help but I was really concerned about the zero weight bearing requirement. He also connected me to an electric muscle stimulator and that thing was incredible. He connected it to my quad and set it to 15 saying that I could turn it up if I could tolerate it. Of course I cranked it to 50 and although it did hurt it also felt amazing. My muscle was jumping like crazy and it really helped. I'm going to order one for home for sure. He also wanted to track the flex of my knee and asked me to bend it as far as I could. With a lot of pain I was able to get up to 84 degrees. We will see how this progresses. We made a solid plan for moving forward and I'm excited to speed up recovery.

At home I decided to skip the pain meds and instead have a couple of drinks to celebrate progress. At the onset of this procedure I was really scared reading some of the other blogs about this procedure. I thought that I would be useless and a burden to my family for two months but that will not be the case. I'm actually fairly confident that I will be able to drive myself to appointments with a week and that will be a huge milestone for me. Here's to hoping this progress keeps going.

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