Things have been going so much better since my PT and I broke up, especially now that I got some slightly more definitive answers about what's going on with my healing.
I have problems with my knee healing, problems with my psoas, and a nasty, persistent Trendelenburg gait that forces me to use the cane constantly.
Typically a Trendelenburg gait is due to weak glutes, which is SO not my problem, but power training them is helping. I just couldn't do that until now because I didn't know if the femur was fused enough to take actual weighted exercises.
Now that I know that my bone is perfectly healed, I don't have to worry about over loading it.
I've pieced together a rather comprehensive routine based on webpages and videos, and just this week I'm making significant improvement, especially with my knee.
We bought a Bowflex type gym, I'm calling it the Faux-Bow, which is incredibly useful because cables are idea for working small muscles. I love cable machines.
I also picked up a used exercise bike because the knee surgeon said that the rotation is the best thing for getting my knee used to its new orientation and preventing adhesions.
I definitely had adhesions because the first night after doing 2 minutes of zero resistance peddling, I woke up with really sharp tear pain that only lasted a day, and it's been fine since.
I've done thousands of hours of PT exercises addressing so many parts of my body that I'm very good at isolating muscles and judging progress. Plus I've studied substantially more anatomy than they have, not as functionally as they have, of course, but I've learned a lot of that stuff through decades of PT.
Basically, I'm getting much better results DIYing this compared to working with the PT I had for surgery.
My PT, the one I've worked with for years is much better, but I'm not in her province right now, so she can't legally treat me even over zoom. So I'm very, very happy that the routine I've put together for myself is working so well.
I've been saying that something was wrong with my knee since the second week after surgery and everyone kept telling me that of course my knee hurts because a rod was shoved into the bone above it, and all of my FB surgery group folks said they had knee pain too, so I cautiously waited, but I know my knees, and this felt like a torsional pain. Which it turns out it is, and I have to seriously strengthen the medial muscles, which are horribly atrophied.
Anyhoo, all good news since the surgeons told me last week that the only option left to get me walking properly is more intensive and specialized PT. Last week that felt really discouraging because I had been SO diligent with my exercises and I was actually getting worse.
But less than a week later of properly addressing the problems and I'm already feeling improvement.
This aligns with exactly what I said earlier. If you are hitting a wall with PT, it's probably that the PT doesn't have the experience or knowledge to know what to do next and they're just keeping you on a routine that isn't working and just upping the reps to a point that you burn out doing the same thing multiple times a day with minimal results. It's a recipe for failure and giving up and then they blame you for not doing your exercises enough.
Super frustrating, and a common reason why people don't get PT when they need it because they tried it before and it "didn't work."