Entertaining, Ken? Really? LOL :D
Glad to hear a couple of you made it down yesterday. Wish I could have been there! Here is a little more "entertainment" for ya'll. More LOL. (No hard feelings, Ken.)
Last summer after the break healed I was able to get back in my boat, but had to start with 15 minutes at a time. By the time I had built up to about of an hour and a half on lakes I still didn't have enough range of motion to even consider a river. Still had lots of pain in one spot and when a cortisone shot didn't help in September I ended up having another surgery in late October. Fast forward to today and I am still in therapy in a desperate attempt to regain my range of motion and muscle strength.
Unfortunately, early last autumn my cats got flees and I spent 6 weeks vacuuming top to bottom every 3 days, finally stopping the day before my surgery. This gave me tennis elbow in BOTH elbows, which showed up right after the surgery when I was totally dependent on the right arm for everything. When you have tennis elbow the first thing you do is rest the elbow by not doing movements which irritate it (which is just about everything you do), then you start doing eccentric exercises. Due to the surgery on the left wrist I could not rest my right elbow so it became super painful, too painful for me to be able to do my wrist exercises. I was now in a catch-22, needing to rest the elbows yet exercise the wrist and unable to do either. On top of that my wrist therapist was afraid of aggravating my left elbow by doing therapy on my wrist that I couldn't do for myself. Despondent, I gave up all therapy for a month before making a very good decision to change therapists. I knew the elbows would eventually heal, but I was working on a fast approaching deadline for the scar tissue in the wrist.
As of today I cannot kayak at all due to the elbows, which are still painful but beginning to improve. I hope to start paddling short distances again in a few weeks. Therapy for the wrist is excruciating, but I am making progress. Though the doctor thinks I'll only get 60-75% of my range of motion back, the therapist thinks he can eventually get me to 100%. He says I'll be able to do whitewater again. Sure hope he is right! He is now able to push and pull my wrist to the same range of motion as the other wrist but my muscles are lagging way behind to do it myself. It is normal for active ROM to lag behind passive ROM by about 3 weeks but due to the tennis elbow my strengthening exercises have been extremely limited. Thank goodness the TE is finally healing and I can now work on strengthening!!
Barring another mishap, I have set my sights on joining you guys somewhere on the water sometime the first half of this summer. I've enjoyed reading this thread. Ken, you definitely made me laugh. Mike, sorry you missed your opportunity yesterday. Let's both plan on completing this scenic stretch next year! Ken, you are invited to join us. :-P
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