26 February 2010

day 25: my day, in (relative) detail

Have you ever had anyone come at you with a metal object that may or may not (but definitely may) look something like a large butter knife, and then proceed to scrape it across various muscle masses on your body?

Neither have I. Until today.

I started my regimen of physical therapy today, to treat that dad-gum ankle I injured so long ago on January 18 while rehearsing Urinetown. My strength and range of motion of my left ankle is laughable (though Ames finds no reason to laugh--sweet, sweet Ames). Luckily, after an hour-long wait in the waiting room for some mysterious reason we may never know, I was able to visit with D. Neeley who checked me out (my foot, doi, not me me) and said the best treatment would various strength and stretch exercises in addition to the muscle scraping he would like to do twice a week for the next month.

The dance trainer at BYU rolls out the knots in peoples' calves with a rolling pin. A literal rolling pin. And that's why it didn't really surprise me that the metal tools he pulled out to scraaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaape over various ligaments and a particularly nasty, tender muscle up my calf. This is to break up scar tissue so the strength and stretch exercises actually have a chance to work. Makes sense. Sounds hardcore, yeah? I am, thank you.

For reference in your future: butter knives hurt way worse on calf muscles than rolling pins.

After this test of pain tolerance (turns out, my tolerance is pretty high, at least so far, so that's a thumbs up), they hooked me up to an electrotherapy machine to prevent bruising while icing my leg to freeze that anti-scar tissue into place or whatever. Felt weird. Made my toes twitch.

Anyway, so that's what I did today. After that I came back to work and worked FURIOUSLY on a grant proposal worth a couple thou which, I'm proud to say, we submitted on time. So there's that.

Also, we woke up this morning and Ames was afraid the snail in our fish tank, Harvey, had shriveled and died in his pretty gold shell. I wasn't so convinced. And I'm very glad to tell you, Harvey is not dead and he's happily slurping up all the algae in our tank.

Blunt-edged butter knives, writing so fast there was literal (well, figurative) smoke rising from the keyboard, and no escargot on my dinner menu for tonight.

And that was my day.