Day 2

Today I have started to do a lot more icing of my knee- 20 minutes every 2 hours. My leg feels quite swollen, it has a squishy full of liquid feeling. This (so my hospital literature tells me) is normal and can stay for up to 3 months. Excessive movement and exercise can aggravate it, so there has to be a balance between helping the liquid drain and the swelling go down, and doing physio to try and build up the leg muscle and develop strength and control in the leg.

I'm still taking pain killers and feeling quite nauseous. I'm only eating plain food at the moment and I'm having to eat fairly regularly as I seem to feel worse when I have longer gaps between food. The ibuprofen I'm taking should hopefully help with the swelling as well as the pain. I'm also taking something paracetamol based- so nothing all that strong, but it is doing the job.

I've started the very basic physio exercises that I was given prior to leaving the hospital. I'm doing quite well gently pushing my leg straight- it's not there yet, but it's pretty good. After the initial injury it took months and months to get my leg fully straight again.

However, I'm really struggling with bending my knee. I'm trying to do heel slider exercises where I sit on the floor and pull my heel in towards my butt, bending the knee, but I can barely get anywhere.
The worst thing about hardly being able to bend my knee at the moment is that getting dressed is really hard and involves a lot of lying down shuffling to get my shorts over my knee.

Since I'm not going to see the doctor until next week I'm reluctant to push anything so I may be going a bit too slow, but I'd rather that than doing too much and damaging the graft.

I've started to put some weight through my leg, but using both two crutches so in reality most of my weight is going through my good leg and my arms. I don't feel very confident standing on my operated leg, but I think that some of that might well be psychological rather than due to physical instability in the knee. I can't walk properly because of the lack of full extension and bending in my leg, so I'm really only standing on the ball of my foot, but I guess it's some progress.