Sounds pretty cool, right? Let’s see what it really means:

“I need you to drape your foot over the arm of the chair, about mid-calf, so I can easily access your ankle”.

Kimmy repositions the chair so this it’s sideways to me and then adjusts another chair so she can sit close to my foot.

“Is this okay?” I ask.

“Yup”.

She then puts one hand on the bottom of my foot, near my achilles tendon, the other hand on the top, near my toes, and proceeds to push and pull really, really, hard. After several minutes of, nausea inducing, pushes, pulls, and kneading, she eases up puts my foot down, gets up from her chair and walks to the change-room. I’m thinking to myself, that was f$%#ing fun! After a couple of seconds of sitting in the chair with my eyes squeezed shut, trying to hold back the tears, I look and Kimmy’s sitting on the chair and putting some moisturizer on the my foot. Now this is more like it!

“We need to do some cross-friction massage”

I’m thinking massage, all right. Diggetty diggety diggety....And then rahhhhh!, she grabs my foot and starts grinding all the sore swollen parts with a grip of steel, paying particularly close attention to the tight, painful, scar tissue.

This was my introduction to the second phase of my ankle rehabilitation. When I picture a young woman rubbing my foot, (Jo, baby, I don’t really ever picture this) this was definitely not it.