I’ve posted about my ankle and physical therapy before, but the quick version to get up to speed: I sprained it in May, went back to normal activity after the doctor recommended rest period, only it never really healed, kept swelling and bruising, and I kept limping along. I finally sought help and ended up in physical therapy.
I’ve been going to physical therapy for a month. Today was my re-evaluation to assess progress and whether more treatment was suggested. I limped into the evaluation, hurting. The physical therapist was not the same one I’ve been seeing, but she was surprised I was dragging in like that. She did some measuring of my ankle and how it moved, and then she “mmmhmmm”ed and did a bunch of crazy stuff to my ankle before telling me I had a bone stuck in my ankle joint that shouldn’t be stuck!
I learned today that the talus bone is a little bone floating around between the leg and the foot at the ankle. It’s part of the hinging, flexing mojo of the ankle. When I sprained the hell out of my ankle, I jammed that talus bone into the wrong place in my ankle with the impact and it stuck there in that wrong place all this time, causing pain and limiting my range of motion for over 6 months.
The kindly physical therapist said she could manually “unstick” the bone, but that it would be uncomfortable and hurt and to yell if I needed to take a break. It took about half a second of “unsticking” before I was yelling. This is the kind of discomfort that requires a bottle of whiskey and a leather strap to bite down on…but when she was done, wonder of wonders, I could move my ankle better than I had in ages. The whole shebang is pretty sore and swollen after the great bone unsticking event, but there’s finally hope that it will really mend now.