I stopped taking the tramadol on Monday morning as an experiment – nothing was particularly painful so I thought it worth a try. Haven’t needed it since; might not have really needed it at the weekend either.

The quad exercises are all now reasonably straightforward; I no longer need to control my operated leg with the non-operated leg when moving it. This is both because the quad has activated enough that it’ll hold the leg straight without too much trouble, and also because the knee now bends far enough/well enough that I won’t be hyperventilating from pain if the quad were to fail to hold it (been there, caught my breath hard).

This is not to say that my knee bends fully. It’s barely at 90 degrees, so it’s still a bit of an exercise to sit down etc. Today’s moment of progress was to walk up stairs ‘normally’ (instead of good leg up, bad leg up to join it, repeat). There was some pressure on the front of the knee, but it wasn’t specifically painful. Somewhat less painful than pre-op.

Still cannot manage downstairs ‘normally’ – that’s a bend too far just now.

Also can’t quite manage the turbo trainer – I can get on it, which I wasn’t wholly confident about, but cannot bend my knee enough to turn the pedals. That’s not a question of pain, it simply doesn’t bend that far yet – there’s still a fair amount of inflammation.

First physio visit this week – seems to be happy with progress and seems intrigued by the whole thing; as I said before, these types of replacement are unusual, so I suspect she hasn’t seen many.

Also this week, back to the gym (well, back to exercising – upper body only, obviously. Knee rehab is enough for the lower body as I can’t rationally do anything loaded with quads/hamstrings/calf muscles etc). But I have Strava entries!

Surgeon tomorrow.