Monday, June 20, 2016

MRI and the knee...

I have captured a couple of pictures of my knee's MRI.  Though nothing is torn or ruptured, there is damage.  I am basically dealing with tendinitis (perhaps becoming more tendinosis) of the biceps femoris tendon (BFT) (see image below).

From http://www.sportsinjuryclinic.net/

Rehabilitation will involve analgesics (pain management), static and dynamic stretching, and eccentric exercises.  I had to research the term "eccentric exercises", and specifically how it applies to the hamstring muscle complex (HMC).

Here are the MRI images, with the area of the BFT highlighted in the green box.  You can only tell it is intact (good news), and therefore my pain is from tendinitis and not a torn BFT.  The first image is more toward the front of the knee than the image which follows it:


Sunday, June 19, 2016

Knee is improving...

I finally found a way to get my knee to feel better. What it needed was the extended rest.  The way of achieving that extended rest is shown in the picture below:



During the last day of Memorial Day weekend, I was trying to get our wood together from a fallen tree for a bonfire.  I had to flip a rather large log so that I could attach to my utility all-terrain vehicle and pull it to the bonfire.  I had managed to get the log to about 80% of its upright position when it slipped back on me (ground was soft and bark slipped under my hand).  My natural reaction was to try to catch it, and in doing so I ruptured my distal biceps tendon.  The picture above shows my arm week after surgery.  I will spend the next five weeks working on range of motion without lifting anything.  After that, I'll begin the long road back of restoring strength to the arm and tendon. All of this means that I will be able to do very, very little between now and then. Even so, the quiet time that I have been forced to take has worked wonders for my knee. The pain is now isolated to the biceps tendon connecting the hamstring to the knee. I'm using natural analgesics and rest to help that tendon recover.

Despite continual setbacks, there remains much beauty in the world to fuel the desire to push on...