Brace-be-gone, Russian Stim, Walking the walls

Brace-be-gone
It seems that these days each week brings significant improvements. The big change this week is that I finally ceased wearing the leg brace seen in the picture on the blog homepage. In truth I have not been wearing this brace at home since early March. But I was wearing it when out and about until such time as my leg felt strong enough to hold me up – even with crutches – without wavering to the point of fail. In the month since I have been putting more and more weight on the leg, I have developed significant strength in my muscles. I am not yet able to walk without at least one crutch but I am getting closer each day.

Russian Stim
This week in rehab we tried “Russian Stim” to get my muscles moving. Russian Stim is “2500Hertz at 50 pulses per second. This means that 50 times a second a 2500Hertz pulse stream is sent to your muscle. The benefit of this is a deeper penetration of the muscle and more intense contraction. This type of stimulation is commonly used by doctors for treatment of: Rehabilitation, Scoliosis, Spinal Cord Injuries, and chronic muscular pain syndromes.” (http://www.tens-store.com/ems/ems-faq.htm)

Basically Russian Stim involves attaching electrodes to your muscles and cranking up the electricity to the point that the muscle contracts fully and sustains the contraction for a set period of time. I was on RS for about 15 minutes with 10 seconds of juice and 10 second pauses between. The experience is like being stung by a whole bunch of bees at once, except that the stings are less prickly than they would be in real life. When the sting begins, the muscle contracts very firmly. I found the experience odd but useful in that it forced my entire quadriceps to engage. The good news is that I was not very sore that evening or the next day, which indicates that I have already been using the full extent of my quadriceps in my daily exercises.

Walking on the walls
A final recent development is my ability to walk around the upper floor of our tiny house almost entirely without crutches by using furniture or the walls to support myself. This is a spectacle to behold but oddly liberating and it demonstrates increased strength and stability in my leg.

All in all it has been a good week!