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April 04, 2007 / Wednesday
This Kneecap Thing Boggles My Mind
After almost a month wait, I finally had my appointment with the sports medicine doctor (actually, physician assistant, but for simplicity let's just say doctor) today. She wiggled my knees and kneecaps around, ordered an X-ray of my kneecaps, and referred me to a month of physical therapy. Unfortunately for me, the next available PT appointment is in mid-May. She told me to call and ask for a cancellation spot instead. I'm starting to understand everyone's complaints about the Kaiser wait.
She says that my knee caps rotate outward when I extend my leg, which they're not supposed to do. I was told to continue taking it easy on the bikes for another month (surprise surprise), then start to increase mileage and intensity. Schedulewise, this is supposed to overlap with PT, if I can get an appointment sometime reasonably soon.
In the meantime, she gave me an exercise to do. While seated, I'm supposed to extend my leg, push with my thumb on the inside tip of the quadricep muscle near the top of the kneecap, flex that tiny part of the muscle, hold for 10 seconds, and repeat 9 more times. I'm told this part of the quadriceps helps keep my kneecap from rotating to the outside, and that most other leg exercises work muscles and parts of muscles that do the opposite. Overall strengthening of my legs might actually be bad for my knees. What? Huh?
I did a few of them at the gym today and had a good chuckle when I realized what they reminded me of. Let's just say we can boil that whole sequence above down to three words: sit and squeeze.
Bet you didn't expect that in a post about knees.
April 4, 2007 05:39 PM | Injuries
Comments
errr sit and squeeze?... like sitting at the counter and juicing an orange in the morning? yesh that must be it!
i hurt my knee too last week playing tennis :( inexplicable pain when I walk, but only when i lift UP not when i plant down. very weird.
Posted by: Vinny at April 5, 2007 10:11 AM
Boo, knee pain. At least we have doctors, though it often seems like they're just guessing at what's wrong. :(
Posted by: Viv at April 5, 2007 10:17 AM
Hey I have the same knee problem. my knee caps ride outside of the soft cushy groove. I hate to tell you this but all the PT stuff don't work for that knee cap issue. But I won't hurt to give it a try.
I did it all. They still hurt like mo'fos.
Posted by: christy at April 5, 2007 10:21 AM
Nooo! But yeah, I was told that the deviation from soft cushy groove is a congenital thing.
Soft cushy groove. That's the term I was looking for when I wrote this yesterday!
Posted by: Viv at April 5, 2007 10:24 AM