Physio, Week Nine

There is a specific sound a knee makes when it goes, and I'm not going to describe it, because if you know you know and if you don't you should be allowed to stay that way. I'm sitting in the waiting room at the physio. It's a Tuesday. It's always a Tuesday, or a Friday. Week nine. The chairs here are the color of a hospital's idea of calm. Across from me a guy in a shoulder sling is scrolling through his phone with his good hand and a woman my mom's age has an ankle boot up on the chair beside her, and we're all doing the thing where you don't ask each other what happened because you'll be asked back. Mine is stupid. Rec league. Over-30s division, which should tell you the intensity level. I went to cut left, my cleat stayed where it was, and my knee made the sound. I sat down in the wet grass and knew. Even before the MRI I knew, because I've watched enough sports to recognize the exact way the trainer's face went neutral. Surgery was week zero. They took a piece of my hamstring and made it into a ligament, which is either miraculous or barbaric depending on how much painkiller you're on. Weeks one through three were the couch. Ice machine, leg up, a brace that locked straight. I learned how many stairs are in my house (fourteen) and how long it takes to go up them backwards on your butt (ages). My girlfriend Priya brought me things and was patient and then less patient and then patient again, in cycles I didn't have the right to complain about. Week four I stood on one leg for six seconds and it felt like a Nobel Prize. This is what nobody tells you about rehab: it's boring. It's incredibly boring. The exercises are small and dumb. Squeeze your quad. Slide your heel. Lift your straight leg two inches and hold. You do them three times a day and nothing seems to happen, and then one Thursday you notice you walked to the kitchen without thinking about it, and you stand there holding a mug going, when did that happen.

My physio is a woman named Carla who has the demeanor of someone who has heard every excuse and filed them alphabetically. Week six I told her I felt ready to jog. "Show me a single-leg squat." I showed her. "That's a curtsy. Come back in three weeks." So here I am. Three weeks later. My leg looks almost like a leg again. The scar has faded from angry to just kind of pink and thoughtful. I can do the single-leg squat now, or something closer to it, and I've been doing it in the kitchen every morning while the coffee brews, which Priya says is unsettling. The door opens. "Josh?" Carla says. I get up. I don't use the armrests. I notice that I don't. "Let's see it," she says, and I do the squat right there in the doorway, and she watches my knee the way a mechanic watches an engine, and then she nods once. "Okay," she says. "Treadmill. Two minutes. Walk-jog. If it hurts we stop." Two minutes. I'm about to jog for two minutes and I feel like I'm about to run out of a tunnel into a stadium. The guy in the sling looks up as I go past. "Knee?" he says. "Knee," I say. "You?" "Rotator cuff. Softball." "Over-30s?" "Over-40s." We both laugh, and it's a real laugh, and then I go jog for two minutes.