Your body is an amazing thing. It can adapt to almost any injury and find a way to keep everything functioning. It may not be the optimum solution, but it's impressive that it does it all on its own without you even aware that it's happening.
In my case, a muscle on the outside of my thigh called the vastus lateralis has knotted up. This happened as I was returning to walking and activity following the surgery. A muscle on the opposite side, the inside, of my thigh called the VMO was still kind of weak and couldn't really do what it was supposed to do, which is to hold my knee cap in place when my leg bends and moves.
So the vastus lateralis came up with the solution of contracting down pretty hard, which resulted in the knot. It kind of worked. I could walk and get around pretty good. But I still had knee pain upon going down steps and something in my knee just never felt quite right.
My physical therapist identified the tight knot in the vastus lateralis. She did some trigger point release (basically pressing on the muscle), which essentially untied the Gordian knot. My knee felt a lot better. I think I'm going to have to keep working on this muscle though, as well as continue to strengthen my VMO. So there's still a bit of a rough road ahead, but I'll take every wee bit of progress I can get.
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