ACL rehab- a patient’s perspective

how’s the rehab going?

For those of you who don;t know, Darren’s wife Bec underwent her ACL reconstruction earlier on and we thought it would be good to hear from a patient’s perspective.

Well the initial post operative phase has flown by and Bec has been making great progress. She's at a slightly tricky point now, which I'm sure a lot of you can relate to.

She knows she needs to do her rehab, but as her day to day function is a lot better, general life goes on, work is busy, life is busy, finding time to get to the gym for all important rehab work (especially for ACL's) becomes a little harder to juggle.

Luckily she has Tomu to push her and a nagging physio husband at home......she's written a wee diary update:

Tomu the Taskmaster

Have you met Tomu? What a nice guy, so smiley! Butter wouldn’t melt right? Wrong. You haven’t actually met Tomu until you’ve met Tomu at the rehab gym – Tomu the Taskmaster. I’ve named him TT for short. It starts off easy enough, we’ll just warm up on the bike he says. Sounds lovely.

Then he really turns it up – the weights begin. First session, you’d be forgiven for thinking it’d be manageable. As you cringe under the weight of the first ''warm up set'', he chuckles away as he counts out on his fingers to make sure there’s no cheating:

Fairly quickly the shakes set in. I don’t mean a little wobble, but the kind of shakes that could make people jump under a table and hold on for dear life. But there’s no let up from TT.

Just counts away with the grin on his face that you know is there (even under the mask).

Just when you think your legs might actually fall off, he says, one more set. One more set??!!

So that warm up set didn’t even count?? The chuckle, and finger counting starts all over again. After a few different leg machines, we move onto my favourite and the most intimidating – the leg press.

He says “I’ll take it easy on you today” – as he loads another 20kg weight onto the bar:

The burn is so intense that you just have to close your eyes and push through the thousand reps until you hear the magic words “and you’re done”.

It really is an amazing sense of relief, accomplishment and jelly in the leg region.

And by the way – the gym facility is SUPER FANCY, all courtesy of the Careway program – free of charge. If you have to go through the pain and trauma of having ACL surgery, you may as well do it in style.

With TT you can’t go wrong.