Kneeds

Been exploring more areas of Seattle... a couple weeks ago Stephen & I took a decently epic walk to Annapurna (for delicious Indian food) and then up to Blaine Steps/Streissguth Gardens.

Lately we've been having weekly date nights, which generally involve some amount of walking. This past week we walked to Pie Bar to try their savory dinner pies (almost as good as their wonderful dessert pies!), and then walked up Broadway Ave to see the movie Under The Skin (which was more artsy-creepy than I'd hoped) at Capitol Hill's historic Harvard Exit Theatre.

It was probably a bad sign
 that I felt I was walking like a robot.

Last week was my very last physical therapy session with Avant. I got some parting advice about ways to modify my walk, which I think I was a little too diligent in observing -- after a week of modified walking and a night of enthusiastic dancing I was feeling some troubling, near-constant pain in my right knee. I was very glad this past Sunday to be able to go in for a free dance injury screening with Seattle Dance Medicine. They helped me further tune my walking patterns -- I'd been over-correcting in response to my PT's advice -- and guided me away from certain knee-strengthening exercises and towards others, which have been helping a lot.


Again and again I'm finding that because I need to push myself in order to work back up to my old levels of strength, it's to be expected that sometimes I'll go a little too far and end up in pain. In those cases it seems that the best way out is through -- to double down on PT exercises, making sure I know which exercises will help rather than exacerbate the problem. Even though this ebb and flow of improvement and pain sometimes makes me feel like I'm just going in circles, my overall physical condition really is improving. It wasn't that long ago that, between foot pain and knee pain, I couldn't be up on my feet for the length of time it took me to take a shower. So I keep reminding myself -- even if I'm still experiencing occasional setbacks, I've come a long way!