Starting PT

Now the fun really begins! I had my first and second PT sessions last week and started walking with a boot and crutches and now can walk without support. I am using a cane to try to level out the walking a little but am walking enough to make my shin sore while everything else is feeling great.

The main focus of the PT is on strengthening and not on range of motion at this point. I didn't quite understand the therapists explanation of the mechanisms behind this (I was trying to spell the alphabet with my foot and somehow it took all my mental focus to do that) but the main concern is over-stretching the tendon. If that happens, it will be really hard to have strength in the range of motion required to push forward. So for now, building strength is the key. I could start doing some riding of my bike on a borrowed trainer but wasn't strong enough to change the pedals over the weekend. I will try again soon.

Last Wednesday after PT, 4 hours at work, and learning to walk again in the boot, I had an acupuncture treatment. Ever since the surgery, I have been extremely sensitive to the needles - much more than before. Part of this is that she can't "confuse" my nerves in my ankle area by pressing on them prior to inserting the needles because it would hurt too much to press that hard. Part of it is that my system is still a mess and needs some time to get back to normal. And some if it is due to the slight swelling I am still working on below the injured area. She has been focusing on getting things in better alignment, healing, and reducing swelling. I am also continuing to take a suite of chinese herbs to help with the swelling and keep my calves relaxed. As far as I can tell, all this is helping me. My most recent treatment was my most "normal" yet. She thinks that the herbs and treatments have me doing better than I was before the injury (except for my achilles of course). But my pre-surgery status was related mainly to trying to rebuild my body after the stress of the tenure process.

The tenure process is an interesting experience. You put every fiber and thought into getting as much done as possible before you have to send your packet out for review. You barely see family and friends, take on too many projects, and are always looking for one more paper. I really enjoyed the lag between submitting an article to a journal and hearing back because it meant I could focus on another project. I was working at a rate of submitting or re-submitting an article every month for the last year and a half of the process and was right at the upper limit of my productivity during that time. And some projects fell to the wayside and some surprised me to get done quickly. One surprise was a paper just recently accepted to the electronic journal of applied statistics (for statisticians, the acronym EJASA is not a coincidence).

The story behind it is not really all that typical: I was working with some Arctic researchers on other projects and they brought me a side project looking at presence or absence of certain microbes in different layers of ice cores. The data set wasn't conducive to inference, really it just needed a nice description of the patterns observed. I did a standard hierarchical cluster analysis but the reviewers wanted some revisions on the paper. I ran into a different type of clustering more suited to the binary nature of the data set and showed the results to them. They thought it was nice but that the plot was hard to interpret. So I made it better. And that application paper got accepted. And then I used the same method on a data set from the Examining Mathematics Coaching (EMC) project that I am funded on and showed it to those collaborators and they thought it was interesting as well. So I wrote a paper describing the method being used and why the graph I developed was useful, and suggested some different areas of interest for its application. I think it took me a week to write the paper although it was built on my previous work and feedback from great collaborators. The first reviews wanted more of a contrast between methods and I added that to it shortly after the semester ended. I am happily surprised about its subsequent acceptance but it shows that small novel ideas can get you publications without years of work. And sometimes years of work on a project barely gets you a publication. 

The main frustrations of last week have been hearing the recovery timeline re-iterated and some stiffness in my neck. My neck has improved, but I am still faced with the following. The surgeon says 6 months to fully unrestricted activity and the physical therapist said that I will struggle to recover my previous strength for up to around a year. So my week has included the excitement of walking, returning that awful scooter, starting my PT, getting an article accepted... and then thinking about a long time to getting back to where I was a month ago. But I feel like I have a good team around me - PT, acupuncturist, wife, and dog. And I will get to cross-country ski this winter so I can't wait for the snow.