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

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…