Well I had my third physiotherapy appointment a couple of weeks ago, and things are still going really well. Even in just a month of doing the gentle exercises, mostly laying down, I have seen some little improvements in my ability to climb the stairs each day.

It’s nothing drastic, but lifting my foot up high enough to reach the next step has become that little bit easier. And most of the time I’m a tiny bit steadier on my feet while climbing them too.

This may not sound like a big deal, but it makes the task of getting up to bed each night that little bit less challenging. It’s often still like climbing a mountain, but perhaps that mountain is becoming more scale-able.

So at my physio appointment we ran through whether I had been managing the exercises suggested, and how frequently/how many reps of each I’d been doing, before going through them one by one to make sure I was doing them correctly. (Turns out I was doing one of them slightly wrong, so it’s just as well we did that! My memory isn’t the greatest, so it didn’t come as a surprise that I’d done that)

We discussed adding in an additional exercise once a day, which we agreed would be manageable. Along with increasing some of the easier exercises to twice a day instead of once, by easier I mean the ones my muscles clearly weren’t struggling with, unlike others which when I complete my muscles still shake with weakness.

It was also suggested I slowly start increasing the number of reps I do of the exercises by 1 rep, working towards doing 5 reps of each. But this can be done as slowly as required; increasing by 1 rep, on one exercise done once a day, doing it for a week or so and then trying another increase in a similar manner.

The most important part about that is if it proved to be too much I should drop it back to what I was managing, and continue in that way until I felt it was time to try again. Because there is no point in pushing, it will likely do more harm than good.

So all in all another great appointment. I go back again in a month, and we will see what progress has been made, whether I’ll have been able to increase the number of reps of some exercises, and by how much. But I don’t feel under pressure to have managed it, and I think that is possibly the most important part about this process; if it isn’t manageable we will review things, it won’t be seen as a failure on my part, or as me not trying hard enough. And that makes all the difference.

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