Physical Therapy and Exercises for a Fractured Pelvis

I'm lucky to have good health insurance so I was able to get out-patient physical therapy after I fractured my pelvis. There is a great place to go near my house where I went before after I fractured my knee in 2008; so I trusted them, which is a big part of recovery from any traumatic injury. I needed to have confidence that my physical therapist wasn't going to hurt my injury and make it worse.

 A lot of physical therapy is manual resistance training where the therapist forces you to press against his or her hand as they move your injured leg around in ways you would have never imagined it was capable of. One of the first scary things he did was to pull my knees apart and then force me to try to put them back together, pushing against his grip. My leg had atrophied since my injury and this move was a lot harder than you'd think. Another challenging action my physical therapist did was to lift my injured leg all the way up upon his shoulder and then ask me to press my ankle against his body.  At first, I thought, you have got to be kidding.  I didn't think I could do it, but I did.  One of the first "accomplishments" I could do today was to stand up and sit down without relying on a walker.  This was a big deal for me.  He tried to help me walk across the room and take a few steps without a walker, but I wasn't able to accomplish it yet.  After only a few steps, I told him, "I can't do it."  I have so many things to learn.  The biggest ingredient in a successful physical therapy session is to lose the fear of falling and the horrible memory of how much it hurt when I fell. I will walk again!

Here are some exercises my physical therapist had me do for my fractured pelvis:

If the print on the samples below is too small for you to read, please go to my-exercise-code.com and use code QG48BHC when prompted. The website even has videos you can watch to learn how to do these exercises correctly.