Recovery Weekend

This weekend is Jill's Recovery Weekend. I do have some training scheduled: an afternoon swim today and a 1.5 hour ride tomorrow on the trainer. But mostly this weekend is about mental and physical rejuvenation after the past 4 months of school-training, rehabiliation and lots of paperwork.

This week has been a tough one. I finished up my clinical internship on Friday at Medsport. I had a lot of mixed feelings about it. In fact, I'm pretty sad. In one sense, it means that I am now one step closer to finishing school (and to start paying back that mountain of loans). On the other hand, I am going to miss all of my co-workers, the nice facility, my patients and generally the great work atmosphere. (There is always a chance though that I'll end up back there at some point since Aaron and I don't plan on moving to far out of the area after I finish school.) Since my team gets out at noon on Fridays we all went to lunch at a great little restaurant in Ann Arbor called Caseys. Great burgers and fries. The place was packed so you know it's good.

I got a great review by my clinical instructor so now I have to gather up all my paperwork to send in to school before I start my NEXT and FINAL internship on Monday. My knee is very thankful that there are no more 12.5 hour days on my feet. The hardest thing was hitting 4 o'clock in the afternoon when it was starting to get dark and knowing that I still had another 3.5 hours to go.

My doctor was pleased to see that my knee is improving. My quad tone is nearly equal with the right, almost all the swelling is gone and I can generally get my knee bent to 120 degrees. It is still short of my right knee but it is getting better. Last night I was even able to get my heel to my butt several times all by myself. This is by far the best that I have been. I think that there is a very good chance that I'll be able to start running at 6 months post-op.

Now that I am getting more comfortable about the progress of my knee, I can start focusing more time on strenghtening and stretching the rest of my body. I feel like my left leg is the strongest part of me and it is not even at 100%. Aaron got me a massage at a place in town today and it was there that I realized how badly other areas of my body need attention, especially my shoulders. I'm getting far to hunched from all the swimming and aero positioning on the bicycle. I was instructed to start doing a self friction massage at the attachment of the pec muscle on the ribs. I never thought about this but I just tried it. Yep, I'm tight. No wonder my shoulders don't want to go back anymore.