Well I’m at 17 weeks now, and our pool has finally warmed up to 29 degrees, so I have started the swimming adventure, and it’s a weird one.
As a scuba diver with more dives and years of experience than I care to admit, my sense of buoyancy is very finely tuned. I can safely say that my legs weigh a great deal more than they did, at present. I used to lie on my back and float, totally relaxed and with no movement, breathe in, toes appear out of the water, breathe out, legs slowly sink a bit, breathe in, toes reappear and so on. Now, they hang down below me, and no amount of inhaling will budge them! The extra weight of metal, and fluid from the afternoon swelling, is possibly the near equivalent of having a kilo of lead around my knees.
If I swim freestyle, I have to kick slightly faster than I would before to stop my legs from sinking.
I am thrilled than I am able to do breaststroke leg kick. But try to do a strong kick, and my knees do not like the sideways thrust of the lower legs. So it now takes 10 kicks per length of our pool instead of four. So hoping that this will improve, I want my strong leg kick back for diving. My back aches from trying to keep my legs up without kicking hard.
So it’s early days, and hopefully the extra weight of my knees will become a much more minor issue once they are not carrying the fluid.
The pool steps are great for practicing kneeling. Water up to my shoulders, fine. Chest, weird feeling. Hips, slight discomfort. Mid thighs, burning sensation, from scar I would imagine. I think I will eventually not have a problem with kneeling.
Another weird thing, I wobble and buckle more now than I ever have done. I almost feel that my knees are overextending. Don’t know whether this is because I have not been walking so much because it’s in the mid 30s and too hot, or because I am missing the support of tight swelling!!! My centre of gravity seems to have changed, and I am back to having to think about straightening up.
Otherwise, things are ok, just ok. I continue to have good days, achey days, random sore areas and the odd zinger. But I can stay on my feet for a couple of hours in the morning, and the same again in the afternoon after a rest and an icing session over midday. I can finally tackle most things, and all that remains that causes a lot of discomfort is deep squatting actions, particularly in the afternoon onwards. Things like getting up off the couch, or going down steps properly. So I can’t complain.