Sometimes we traded them like campfire ghost stories, especially the more ridiculous ones. A disappearance, a murder, a Satanic ritual in the Stull Cemetery, or sometimes just a deeply unnerving feeling experienced while changing your tire by the side of a lonely, rural highway. The story usually involved a friend of a friend who had come to grief in Stull. When I was in college, there was a series of urban myths built around the town of Stull, Kansas. And if you’re a physical therapist, have you considered not assigning exercises in a way that’s guaranteed to make them as loathsome as possible? I don’t know if anybody else is trapped in a counting hell of patellar lifts and hip CARS, but I highly recommend giving up on the counting. (And yes, the vibe method takes the same amount of time as the tedious counting method.) I don’t have to berate or threaten myself.

I just get up in the morning and do them. The way this has completely changed my relationship to rehab exercises is amazing. Then I go onto the next exercise and do it until it feels like enough. I do an exercise until it feels like I’ve done enough. That’s why I feel like I’ve discovered some incredible secret to exercising. Some days it’s nearly impossibly to motivate myself to go do the work. The last three years have been a joyless montage of 3 sets of 10 reps. Counting to 10 over and over and over honestly damages my will to live. Repeat for the next exercise and the next and the next. Once my knee was injured, though, I descended into a hell of rehab exercises. The only exercising I’ve ever enjoyed in life is walking. Maybe the worst part about all this is how completely tedious I find rehab exercises. My right knee is still messed up, and as a result, now my left knee is wrecked from picking up the slack.

I’ve done acupuncture and massage therapy. I’ve done three separate rounds of physical therapy. In the last three years, I’ve been to various doctors. Sadly, Bruno has left us, but I’ll never forget him courtesy of my knee. After that, my knee has never been right again. In fact he hit me so hard that my knee locked up in the straightened position for several hours before I could get it to bend. All eighty pounds of him–BLAM!–directly into the front of my right knee. Back in 2020, this magnificent knucklehead was so happy to see me that he ran full speed down the length of the house and body slammed me.

Bryn greenwood