A Word about Knee Injuries

At left, see my left knee doing its work, back on the team.

For those who have injured a knee or had knee surgery.

There are many kinds of knee injuries. All will require therapy when the knee is sufficiently healed.

My fall smacked the left knee hard into the pavement. The joint hyper-extended violently, tearing the tissue to mush. The fall cracked the knee bone, but that was the least of my troubles. My knee said, “Okay, if that’s how you treat me, I don’t want to be your knee anymore.” It refused to bear my weight.

For a month I had to keep the knee immobile so the bone could heal. Then the therapy began. At first I could only bend my knee at a 55 degree angle. The therapist gave me a printout of about ten exercises, which I did faithfully for weeks and months. Here is what I learned.

1) Keep up the exercises until you can grab your ankle and bring your heel to your butt. Don’t stop until you have back full flexibility. (After a while I found that my Iyengar Yoga routine included the therapy.)

2) Get your gait back. A leg injury can make you limp, waddle or walk with short steps as if on ice. Don’t settle for that. Get back to the confident walk you had before your injury. Walk a lot. Get back to any and every activity you loved before your injury. For me, that August hike, six months after I fell, was the triumph that said, My knee is back on the team and I’m back among the able!

3) Regular Chiropractic adjustments speed the healing by keeping open the nerve channels to the injured area.