On a recent trip to Las Vegas with some girlfriends, I fell while racing them up the downward moving escalator, which could happen to anybody, I'm sure. In spite of my soft landing (on top of my friend Janet), I managed to ram my knee into the edge of the escalator step, so I could enjoy copious bleeding to go with the painful throbbing that occurs when you smack soft tissue into immovable objects. The next day, I couldn't help observing that my knee, pink and swollen with two vertical slashes, looked just like a pig snout.
After seeing my doctor at home, who had surprisingly little sympathy for my injury, I dutifully applied ice and ibuprofen to various parts of myself. After a few weeks I still had a bad case of snout knee, so I complained to my doctor, who seemed more amused than was professionally appropriate, and she recommended physical therapy.
I had never been to physical therapy before. I only knew what I'd seen in made-for-TV movies, where the heroic amputee learns to walk again, in spite of incredible odds, mountains of pain, and a fiancee who leaves him at the altar "because I can't take seeing you like this." I suspected it would not be like that for me since I could already walk, and I didn't have a fiancee, and the circumstances of my "accident" fell a tiny bit short of heroic.
I hoped it would be relaxing, with heating pads and massage and people moving my knee around for me. Ha! It was like going to the movies to see "Bambi" but screening "Godzilla" by mistake. Therapists, it turns out, are not nice people. On my first day, I showed up in loose sweatpants, a huge tactical error. The therapist told me they'd have to actually see my knee to treat it, and loaned me some ugly red nylon shorts, which were two sizes too big. Once I was swaddled in my Ronald McDonald shorts, I had to travel up and down a hallway, which I believe the therapists called the aisle of pain. (I love pain, get it?) I did a few normal things, like walking lunges and stepping with my knees high, but then they made me perform moves with names like sumo squats and duck walks, eventually working my way up to poodle prances and the mongoose mosey. Therapy, or hazing? You decide.
Once I had traversed the aisle of pain so many times I was reduced to a sloth shamble, I was permitted to sit down. "Here comes the massage", I thought. Wrong again! I was introduced to a harmless-looking device that I quickly found out was designed to deliver ELECTRIC SHOCKS to my leg. How thrilling to watch those muscles dance! After the therapist was done tasering me like a violent criminal, he demonstrated his manual dexterity by manipulating my leg like a clown making a balloon animal. A complicated balloon animal.
After a week or two of this entirely enjoyable regimen, my progress was significant, and I was rewarded with new and even more delightful activities. Granted, I was glad to get out of that hallway, but after the 526th repetition of stepping on and over a box while holding increasingly heavy weights, I was slightly less pleased with the advantages that came with "progress". My dismay grew when I was dragging my *** over that box yet again, and my therapist wandered away to help himself to a muffin and some coffee. I wanted to throw the dumbbell at him, but then I would have needed therapy for my shoulder, so I kept my cool, as much as possible while drenched with sweat.
I spent several weeks visiting my friendly neighborhood therapists and learned many more exotic and painful exercises. I can now do the flamingo frolic or weasel walk as well as anyone, and can leap over boxes in a single bound. In the end, I have to admit that whatever they did, or forced me to do, worked. No more snout knee for me. The moral of this story is, unless you enjoy painful electric shocks, walking like barnyard animals, and performing tricks for cruel therapists who taunt you with muffins, don't go to Vegas.
