The chart on Dr. Okafor's wall showed range of motion over sixteen weeks. Elise had stopped looking at it around week five, when the line went from 41 degrees to 42 and stayed there for three appointments in a row.
"It's not doing anything," she said.
Dr. Okafor drew a rectangle around weeks one through sixteen. "What do you see?"
"A staircase." This was obvious. 41 to 42 to 42 to 42 to 56 to 56 to 56 to 58 to 58 to 58 to 58 to 73 to 73 to 73 to 73 to 74.
"How many weeks were you on a landing?"
Elise counted. "Thirteen. Out of sixteen."
"And how much did you gain on the landings?"
She looked again. "Three degrees. The rest came from the jumps."
"So thirteen weeks of work produced three degrees, and three weeks produced thirty."
"Which means I should skip the landings and just do the jumps."
Dr. Okafor smiled the way she did when Elise said something that was wrong but not stupid. "The landings are what make the jumps possible. The tissue is reorganizing — microfiber alignment, collagen remodeling, proprioceptive recalibration. None of that shows up as range of motion. It shows up as the next jump."
"So I'm healing on the flat parts."
"Almost entirely on the flat parts. The jumps are just when it becomes measurable."
Elise looked at the chart again. Thirteen weeks of invisible. Three weeks of visible. The staircase rising by steps she couldn't feel taking, on landings she couldn't feel leaving.
"How do I know when a landing is about to end?"
"You don't. That's the hardest part. You do the exercises on the landing as if the landing is all there is, and one Thursday you come in and it's different."
Elise flexed her wrist. Seventy-four degrees. The same as last week and the week before. She didn't know if she was three days or three weeks from the next riser.
The exercises were the same either way.