12 March, 2010

Medication Safety Officer: Back at work

I'm finally back to work.
I had my injury on February 19th, saw my primary doc the same day and saw the orthopedic surgeon on 2/22. Had my patellar tendon repair on 2/24.
Two weeks later or so I'm back to work on 3/9. And I'm so thankful for that. I've been slap happy at home, and I know that I was driving my wife, kids and dog crazy.
I never realized how much I traveled in my job.
I travelled so much between the different hospitals, and corporate offices. Some days would involve travelling between campuses 3 or 4 times in a day. What a waste.
With my injury, I cannot drive and depend on my wife to shuttle me to and from work. The meetings at different campuses during the day have to stop right now. Early morning meetings are taken from home on Go-To meeting or conference call.
Week one back to work is in the bag.

Rehab:
Rehab has been slow going. This injury requires enough time for the tendon to knit to the bone. Of course it is reinforced with hardware, but that is not enough by itself. I'm basically supposed to be non-weight bearing on my right leg for 6 weeks and no quadricep firing for 6 weeks. I'm stuck sleeping with the brace for a few weeks more, but may require the brace for walking around until August.
I've been working on strengthening all of my other leg muscles with exercises that limit and quadricep involvement. SUPER HARD to do that. But I do hundreds and hundreds of reps at night to keep the other muscles, tendons, and ligaments in motion. Even with that, my leg is shrinking.
My passive range of motion exercises are coming along. I can move my leg/knee to about 45 to 55 degree of motion with just a little bit of tension on the knee. I have to do that every hour. Next week I'd like to be up to 65 to 70 degrees and then 90 degrees after that.

I'll just keep plugging along.

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Attention Deficit Dad with as many interests as days in the year. You can't hold me back and you can only hope to contain me!