Controls

dylan's blog

Animated sprite for health category
health

Seven Months on the Couch and Now a Physical Therapist Is Asking Me to Do Squats, Cool, This Is Fine

April 30, 2026

A middle-aged man slumped sideways on a beige medical exam table after a PT session, his right ankle visibly fine and slightly smug, wearing a tiny gold medal around it engraved ‘BEST RECOVERED PART OF DYLAN,’ meanwhile the rest of his body is wilting like a forgotten houseplant, a participation ribbon pinned to his shirt reads ‘CARDIOVASCULARLY DECEASED,’ a physical therapist in scrubs stands in the background holding a clipboard with a graph titled ‘THE OTHER 95% OF YOU’ that is just a line going down, on the wall a motivational poster reads ‘YOU CAN DO HARD THINGS (THIS WAS NOT A HARD THING)’ with a cartoon frog giving a sympathetic thumbs up, a frozen water bottle labeled ‘EXHIBIT A’ sits unused in the corner, fluorescent clinical lighting, scattered foam blocks and resistance bands on the floor, a single dramatic shaft of light hits the smug ankle like a saint’s halo, gritty exam-room realism with absurdist props

So I started physical therapy this week. Or — I started physical therapy this week and have been slowly recovering from it ever since.

Here is a thing nobody really mentions about a multi-year ankle saga: the ankle gets all the attention. Doctors, surgeons, MRIs, that one nerve situation where I almost had a fasciotomy in a hospital chair on a Wednesday. The ankle is a celebrity. The ankle has a chart that is six inches thick. The ankle has been on a real journey.

And then you finally get to the part of the journey where someone asks you to walk normally on a treadmill for ninety seconds and you discover that you — the rest of you, the meat envelope around the celebrity ankle — are absolute garbage.

It has been over seven months since I have done any meaningful exercise. The ankle was, for a long stretch, a hostile work environment. So I sat. I rested. I watched Hallmark movies. I made it through the medical adventure intact-ish. And in the meantime my cardiovascular system filed for divorce.

The first PT visit went like this:

  • Range of motion: pretty good, actually
  • Balance on the affected side: still solid, somehow
  • Scar tightness: substantial, present, and the most likely culprit for the dang ol' tightness I keep complaining about
  • Anything we can do about the scar tissue: lol, no, we are not opening that back up, please stop asking
  • A series of “exercises” that on paper look like nothing: completely flattened me

Apparently when you don’t move for the better part of a year, even moving in slow controlled boring ways for thirty minutes is enough to make your body go what is this betrayal. I drove home, went inside, sat down, and did not meaningfully get back up. Sarah asked if I needed anything. I needed to lie down forever, but you can’t really put that on a sticky note.

Here is the thing, though. The ankle isn’t the enemy anymore. That’s the actual headline. For years, every step had a small voice in it going is this the step where it goes wrong. Now the joint is fine. The bones are fine. The hardware is fine. The thing causing the tightness is scar tissue — which is to say, my body’s well-meaning but overzealous repair work — which is the most on-brand injury I have ever heard of. We have fixed this. We have fixed this so hard. We may have fixed it slightly more than necessary.

The PT plan is straightforward and humbling. Get the body back. Build the muscle that quietly emigrated sometime around October. Stretch around the scar without fighting the scar. Slowly remind myself that I used to walk on stilts for five hours at a stretch and that I am, in fact, the same person.

The goal, as I told the therapist, is mostly just to stop feeling like my ankle is my opponent. With a stretch goal of getting back to doing stupid things — juggling, balloon gigs, possibly stilts again, lifting heavy nephews. The bar is on the floor. Lifting it from the floor is the workout.

So. Cautiously optimistic. Slightly wrecked. Adding “physical therapy survivor” to the résumé next to “commercial diver” and “made 52 bow ties in a year for unclear reasons.”

Stay healthy, do your boring exercises, and stay safe.