Tag Archives: knee

Breaking the silence

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I’ve been silent too long on these pages so I am going to force myself to sit in front of my com­puter and explain what’s been hap­pen­ing. Over the sum­mer, the demands on my time and energy have pushed aside blog­ging. Some­thing had to give. I’ve also felt that I really did not have a lot of insight to inject into the blo­gos­phere, espe­cially about my own yoga prac­tice or yoga as a part of US main­stream cul­ture or the DC yoga scene. I had a cou­ple of drafts in the hop­per and could never focus enough to get them done.

Hon­estly, I was bat­tling through some injuries that kept me from going to yoga class. I devel­oped a prob­lem with my iliop­soas and SI joint, this time on the right side. I stopped going to yoga class and kept up treat­ment with my chi­ro­prac­tor. But I also devel­oped a prob­lem with my left knee about the same time (early Sep­tem­ber), which has grad­u­ally got­ten worse. I first felt a twinge of pain in the knee, but did not think that it was any­thing seri­ous ["Must have twisted my knee in my yoga classes"]. I started  tak­ing Aleve in the morn­ing and evening to get by. I saw my ortho­pe­dic sur­geon as soon as I could get an appoint­ment. He exam­ined it and found some inflam­ma­tion, but noth­ing showed up on the x-​​rays. He injected cor­ti­sone. I was sup­posed to wait 2-​​3 weeks and if there was no improve­ment, I should get an MRI and go back to see him. The idea being that I may have some car­ti­lage float­ing around in there, and would need do another arthro­scopic surgery to clean up my knee, as with my right knee.  My doc­tor told me to stick with doing sta­tion­ary bike for exer­cise and keep my yoga sim­ple so that I do not stress my knee joint.

I found myself in a kind of  down­ward spi­ral: I didn’t go to yoga class to avoid wors­en­ing my core (iliop­soas) issues, so my neu­ropa­thy wors­ened; my neu­ropa­thy led to bad body mechan­ics (walk­ing), which causes pain in my knee; I didn’t exer­cise to avoid hurt­ing my knee, which reduced my sta­mina and resilience; my gen­eral fatigue reduced my abil­ity to man­age and tol­er­ate pain; my pain kept me from sleep­ing early and soundly and led to sleep depri­va­tion, which turned me into a zom­bie dur­ing the day. That sounds like a famil­iar for­mula — I went through some­thing like it last year.

I think I have things under con­trol now, thanks to work­ing with my chi­ro­prac­tor and my body worker, and mon­i­tor­ing my symp­toms. I have never stopped doing my evening rou­tine of self-​​massage, hip open­ers, stretches and restora­tive poses so I have not stopped doing yoga. If any­thing, it’s what keeps me going phys­i­cally, emo­tion­ally, intel­lec­tu­ally, psychologically.

And in August, my desktop’s hard disk went out, which required installing the Win­dows oper­at­ing sys­tem, my appli­ca­tions, work­ing files and music. I am still try­ing to get the com­puter back to where I feel that it meets all my needs. For­tu­nately, hav­ing a lap­top kept me going with e-​​mails and other essentials.

In any case, I did not feel much like blog­ging dur­ing these past six weeks. I’ve wanted to make some changes in the lay­out and fea­tures, which have had only minor tweaks from the orig­i­nal Word­Press tem­plate, but that’s going to have to wait for a while. Just main­tain­ing my web­sites takes a lot of time.

Another use for Yoga Tune Up Balls

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To pro­tect my knees in com­pro­mis­ing yoga posi­tions, such as half pigeon, I nor­mally stick a rolled-​​up hand towel behind my knee, pressed between my thigh and calf, to pre­vent my menis­cus from being pinched.

Today I took my Yoga Tune Up Balls to class and used them in half-​​pigeon in place of the towel. With its uni­form size and resilience, the ball fits snugly in the hal­low cre­ated by my knee lig­a­ments and seemed to gen­er­ate more space in my joint. I will inves­ti­gate what other poses which I can use the balls with.

I got the idea from doing one of Jill Miller’s lower body rou­tines, in which I sit in hero’s pose, with the balls between my thighs and calves, and grad­u­ally work the ball posi­tion from just behind the knee to mid-​​calf, giv­ing the mus­cles a mas­sage by mov­ing from side to side.

Progress report – fourth class

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I went to my fourth class on Tues­day evening at Thrive, with Pierre again. I kept try­ing to throt­tle back on my prac­tice, to keep from over­reach­ing and get­ting ahead of my recov­ery. For the first time, I did some jump-​​backs and jump-​​forwards in my vinyasa, but only after warmly up thor­oughly. I did notice a touch of stiff­ness and dis­com­fort in my injured knee. I have to be care­ful when get­ting into kneel­ing posi­tions, like hero’s pose (Virasana) and even child’s pose (Bal­asana) because my body weight rests heav­ily on my knees.

Pierre will not be back at Thrive for a while. His nomadic jour­ney will bring him back to the DC area in Feb­ru­ary. He’s helped me feel more at ease with my injury and invit­ing me accept the heal­ing process as a renewed explo­ration of my body: “With the breath, every­thing you do can be yoga.”

A second class on the mat

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I went to Thrive again this evening, after giv­ing myself 48 hours to recover from my first yoga ses­sion in four months. Tonight’s class was with Eliz­a­beth Pope, a new teacher for me, who joined the stu­dio after I hurt my knee. She’s been exposed to a range of teach­ers, from Kasthaub Desikachar to Ana For­rest. It was a good solid class for all lev­els so I mod­i­fied most of the poses to con­cen­trate on my knees. Where I really felt it was in my shoul­der and upper arms: all the chararun­gas in the vinyasas were pun­ish­ing me for wimp­ing out dur­ing my con­va­les­cence and not main­tain­ing my core strength. Eliz­a­beth con­firmed this con­clu­sion by mak­ing us do mul­ti­ple sets of abdom­i­nal exer­cises that left me barely able to lift my head and neck off the ground. I sweated pro­fusely and had to take child’s pose on sev­eral occa­sions because my con­di­tion­ing has lagged far more than it should have, espe­cially in the last few weeks when I was strug­gling with resis­tance to going to the gym and the studio.

At long last, in class again!

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I was finally able to fit in a yoga class at Thrive with Pierre Cou­vil­lion this evening. My first class since mid-​​August and almost two months after my knee oper­a­tions. I forced myself to go by pack­ing my kit and rolling up my mat this morn­ing before I left for work and giv­ing my wife instruc­tions to take it to the stu­dio when she went to her class in the after­noon. I knew I had to put some kind of imper­a­tive in the for­mula because I was build­ing up all kinds of resis­tance to the yoga class and even going to the gym, even though I can feel the adverse effects that their absence is hav­ing on my body and temperament.

Pierre led a pretty straight for­ward class that was good for me because it was am all-​​levels class that empha­sized ground­ing in the basics of good form and breath. I did not do any­thing crazy — no jump-​​backs or jump-​​throughs, no wheels or advanced inver­sions. I just wanted to feel easy and com­fort­able in my asanas, and focus on my knees to make sure that they were solid and fully engaged. Pierre led us through some fun­da­men­tal vari­a­tions in stand­ing poses that rein­forced the track­ing of the leg mus­cles. I think the fac­tor that had dete­ri­o­rated the most dur­ing the break was balance.

In prepa­ra­tion for the class, I had a ses­sion of acupunc­ture in the morn­ing that was sup­posed to help break up some of the scar tis­sue in my knee.

Slow going

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It is so hard to get back into the habit of blog­ging and prac­tic­ing yoga. I come home in the evening, and really have trou­ble mus­ter­ing the energy and focus to tackle either of these activ­i­ties that were so closely bound together for nearly four years. If I let my guard down, it’s 10:30 and I can just fit in a lit­tle med­i­ta­tion, some pranayama. Because of some fam­ily issues, I did not even make it to the gym this week­end for exer­cise. My knee injury broke more than my menis­cus. I just feel pulled in so many direc­tions, and then throw in the wor­ries of the eco­nomic down­turn and what it can mean in per­sonal terms. It’s like an unsta­ble weather pat­tern, just on the edge of down­pours, stiff winds and flooding.

It’s getting close

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I am slowly work­ing my way back to prac­tic­ing yoga. My ortho­pe­dic sur­geon has given me a thumbs up on my recov­ery, and does not need to see me again. I have been putting in a daily aver­age of 30 min­utes walk­ing and 30 min­utes sta­tion­ary bike for about a month. I’ve gone back to climb the eight flights of stairs of my office build­ing. I’ve been doing some of the rehab exer­cises. I had a ses­sion of acupunc­ture on my knee today, and I’ll get a mas­sage tomor­row, so I’ve been lav­ish­ing care on my body.

If I do a lot of walk­ing, I will have a lit­tle dis­com­fort in my knee the fol­low­ing day and it will feel stiff. I’ve also noticed recently that I have a lot of dis­com­fort in my right sit bone, prob­a­bly due to the ham­string. I can’t take sit­ting down for a long time.

I am aim­ing to start up yoga class again next Tues­day at Thrive Yoga. Pierre Cou­vil­lion will teach that evening. Although it’s a rel­a­tively advanced, all-​​levels, vinyasa flow class, I would pre­fer to have the watch­ful eye of a yoga ther­a­pist watch­ing as I move through the poses. He told me he could indi­cate mod­i­fi­ca­tions of those poses that might be risky for me.

I really miss the com­mu­nity of the yoga stu­dio, and also the dis­ci­plined struc­ture that a reg­u­lar prac­tice builds into my life. Even though I should have more “free time,” I don’t seem to get a lot more done. I really miss the big mus­cle move­ments from the vinyasa. Aer­o­bic exer­cise or weight lift­ing does not pro­vide the same kind of satisfaction.

Another weekend, more recovery

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I got to the gym twice this week­end, and put in two ses­sions of 60-​​minutes each on the sta­tion­ary bike and another 25 min­utes on the ellip­ti­cal trainer. I lifted some weights, enough to make me sore two days later. Dur­ing the week, I was able to do a few short ses­sions of rehab.

Ear­lier in the week, I got my sutures removed and the doc said that every­thing looked fine and to come back in three weeks. He sug­gested that I do some phys­i­cal ther­apy to get back up to speed.

I also checked in with Pierre Cou­vil­lion who rec­om­mended that I take at least a month, maybe two, to ease myself back into yoga. Is he being overly cau­tious? Or am I just an ingrained over­achiever who always has to push harder and farther.

Update on long weekend

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This past week­end, I went to the gym and got on the sta­tion­ary bicy­cle to build up strength in my leg and build up my con­di­tion­ing. I also did sev­eral ses­sions of rehab exer­cises for my knee. I worked up to 60 min­utes on the bike and felt no adverse con­se­quences. I will have my sutures removed on Wednes­day and I’ll be able to do some swim­ming after that.

At work, I’ve run into two other col­leagues who had ortho­pe­dic surgery on their knees — I guess menis­cus tears are con­ta­gious (he said ironically).

Coming back onstream

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More graph­ics than you may want to see of my torn menis­cus,
but I couldn’t resist. Photo cour­tesy Dr. Graeter

Today is the first day in which I’ve been able to string two sen­tences together. I had my out­pa­tient surgery on Fri­day after­noon, and was on pain med­ica­tions until last night. I took off my sur­gi­cal ban­dages yes­ter­day, and now keep an Ace ban­dage to sup­port my knee. I ice the knee as often as I can (15 min­utes at a time). Yes­ter­day, I was able to walk around with­out crutches. Today, I can climb stars. I can go down stairs only one step at a time, plac­ing my injured leg first. The doc­tor says that I can start exer­cis­ing on a sta­tion­ary bicy­cle by next Sat­ur­day. I will get my stitches out early next week. I expect to be back at work tomor­row unless I wake up with a com­pli­ca­tion (say, over­did walk­ing and stair climbing).

The oper­a­tion itself went rather unevent­fully. I had to wait about 90 min­utes at the GW Hos­pi­tal before they started the sur­gi­cal prep. I guess they just want to make sure patients are on site and ready for the pro­ce­dure, but it’s bor­ing. I was briefed about the pro­ce­dure and given post-​​operation instruc­tions. I was wheeled into the surgery room and I was uncon­scious before I could take in the full sur­round­ing. I just noticed that it was chilly.