Start of year 4

Hello again everyone, my excuse for not writing is that I take the summer off from blogging/I get lazy and forget. So to get started here in year 4 of my adventure in France, I am currently getting some therapy done on my knee.

This summer I had my knee scoped to clean up some meniscus and since then I have had a couple set backs in my battle back to 100%. I was feeling really good at one point this summer after about 10 weeks post op, so I went pretty hard on the ice, which resulted in some unwanted swelling, forcing me to take a step back from training and resulting in loss of muscle mass in the quad. As much as I tried to get back to training, the more it would swell up.

So let's fast forward to today, I have been in France for just over a month and after seeing the surgeon a few times, with no real improvement in his tactics, we have taken it to the next level. I am in Metz at a rehabilitation centre, where I get 2 hours/day of physio, 2 hours/day of strength training and 1 hour/day of under water training. Not to mention 3 meals a day and my own room with tv and internet (where I lie as we speak).
Note: this is not all athletes here, we have many people fresh off operations, so that includes many old people too :)

Since I am all alone here in the evening, I guess I could even keep a daily log of what we are doing here to get me back on the ice as soon as possible. And include to my Canadian readers, some of the differences we have here in France, as opposed to what we might see back home.

6:00am- Alarm goes off to wake up in Epinal.
6:30am- drive to Thionville with Marion and her dad (in his BMW)
6:31am- I fall asleep
8:20am- Arrive at ADAPT and check into my room

too much detail???? Ok I will cut it a bit shorter and get to the interesting stuff

9am- Nurse arrives, takes my MRIs and a history of what has been done so far and gathers all info to relay to the Dr. and physios
10am- See Doctor (though the doc I am supposed to see is not here? Kind of typical in France during vacation time, but it doesn't get less frustrating)
11am- First physio treatment, assessment and Electric stimulation to try to get my quad muscles firing again.
12pm- Lunch
1pm- In the pool, wearing a tight swim suit, I start off doing squats while balancing on a board under water, then progress to single leg knee drives up/down, then leg cycles, adduction/abduction, finishing with leg cycles again a walking laps for a cool down. Time of work was about 45 minutes non stop.
2pm- Strength training, today was just to measure where I was at with weights before performing the whole circuit tomorrow. This session focuses mainly on upper body, while the morning session will focus on strengthening my legs.
3pm- More physio assessments and tests, followed by some diagonal leg raises with manual resistance from the physio. This will strengthen the adductors/abductors as well as the quads, while keeping the leg in the extended position
4pm- Ice for the knee and I had a little snack in my room and spent time with Marion before dinner.
6pm- dinner

Well that turned out to be longer than expected....... But now that day 1 is over, day 2 and so on will have less of a lead up and I can just log the stuff I did, that way it will mentally reinforce the work I do as well! And to keep my readers interested I will have to include some funny stories or just odd occurrences.

So today, let me think...... Well at every meal, the entire centre eats at the same time and we are all assigned a seat at a table, with the same people everyday. The the meal arrives it is on a platter, so we do not have our individual plates of food. I arrived a bit late because I was still getting some treatment on my knee and the nurse shows me to my seat. (As I mentioned above, there are lots of old people here.) To my amazement, the room is 75% old people, with an average age of probably 70 (exaggerating), so my table has one guy my age and the rest around 70+. One guy was missing a leg.

Ok, so I had no idea what to expect, is everyone depressed here and we all just eat in silence? After all, the guy next to me has no leg.... So I sit down, I say hello, my accent sticks out like a sore thumb, but also serves as a great ice breaker and before I knew it, the whole table was talking. I did not always understand what they were saying because the woman in the wheelchair across from me spoke very softly and with an Alsace accent (German-like). The food was ok, there was rice, roast beef, Greek salad and bread, and the huge advantage to eating with these nice old people, was that they barely eat at all!!! So I cleaned up the plate of roast beef at lunch time and gladly took the elderly lady's steak at dinner time.

It turned out to be a good day, the one man at the table who is delivered an egg carton full of pills said "we are not going to start crying, everybody here is sad. We are going to have a good time." While continuing to speak, he stops and starts winking an a woman from the other table. He was convinced she was just starring at him, turns out she was checking out the menu, which was located, directly above his head.

I can't wait to see what tomorrow brings :)