Saturday, March 16, 2013

Holy &@#! That Hurts

I've always thought of myself as someone with an above average pain threshold.  In my 43 years I've endured having my sun burned belly dragged across the coral in Barbados and was still swimming around afterward. I accepted a cortisone shot into the arch of my foot with hardly a complaint. Root canal? No problem.

That was until Thursday when I went to my second physical therapy appointment. No dry needling this time.  If only it was something as pleasant as having a needle stuck into one of my muscles. Instead, my therapist Nick used a plastic edge thing to run down the instances of fibrosis. There's a dearth of good information on the web about my specific condition so unfortunately, I don't have a link. Suffice it to say that fibroids in this instance are small pockets of inflexible muscle that cause more stress on the healthier surrounding tissue.

What to do about such a problem? Apparent,y run this edge (a bit like the back of a comb) over the affected area with a lot and I do mean a lot of pressure! I could feel the small little lumps breaking down as he worked on them. I was told that another factor of the condition is a lack of vascularization in the area which, of course, means less blood flow.

Once he had finished there were several red streaks in the treated area and two days later, I am still sore.

Torture  Raking was not the only treatment we had. There were also some balance exercises at which I was uniformly terrible. The first involved standing, knees slightly bent on an inverted BOSU ball while Nick bounce passed a basketball to me. Not directly to me. No, to the side down low anywhere that involved my losing my balance.

I also did a few minutes on a balance board and then some more on a balance disk which basically allowed me to lose my balance in multiple directions.

I go back on Monday and I'll be asking about running. It's been almost a month since I've been and I'm anxious to get started again. 

Early Wednesday morning I'm off to Phoenix for my annual work visit and it would be great to be able to do even a short run while there.

More to come on my next treatment and that trip.

Thanks for reading

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