Voodoo

The last time I posted to this blog, I was in a LOT of pain.  My lower back hurt, and was spasming uncontrollably.  The pain in my posterior was the worst it had ever been, and it felt like someone was electrocuting my leg continually.  It was the most pain I have ever experienced, and I was not particularly happy.  I had just started seeing a new physical therapist, Jon Weinberg at Team Care, for my back pain, and I was cautiously pessimistic about whether he could do anything about the butt pain that has kept me in bed for the last year.

Skip ahead a few weeks, and I'm feeling a LOT better.

I think physical therapy is voodoo.  This is the second time that a PT has told me that a terrible pain was actually coming from a nerve problem in a completely different location.

At some point in the first year of my injury, after I began sleeping on my stomach, I began waking up with extreme pain in my elbows.  It was bad enough that I could barely use my arms to sit up in the morning.  I tried everything I could think of to take pressure off my elbows while I was sleeping, but nothing seemed to work.  When I finally told a PT about it, she said, "Oh yeah, there's a nerve in your armpit that is causing that.  Find a sleeping position that takes strain off your shoulder, and it should clear right up."  She was dead right.  My shoulder and armpit weren't bothering me at all, but that was the source of the problem, and once I took pressure off it, my elbow pain went away as if by magic.

For a year, my butt has been getting worse and worse, and nothing I did seemed to make it better.  Jon comes along and tells me I need to stretch my back to make my butt better.  I told him I didn't think that would help, but that I'd try anything.  He's got me doing these twists to try to straighten out the disks between my vertebrae.  The theory is that I've got multiple bulging disks bulging in different directions, and it will require a variety of weird stretches to improve the problem.  It has already helped tremendously.

The problem I have is that with my engineering background, I tend to think in terms of problems and solutions, and I like to solve my own problems.  I've been very successful when it comes to improvising mechanical solutions to problems, but when it comes to problems with my body, I'm missing key knowledge about how things work.  If a problem isn't caused by the thing that hurts, you can work on that thing forever without making any progress.  It's that detailed knowledge of how things work that makes PTs so effective.  I guess I can't solve ALL of my problems myself.

I'm certainly not pain free, and I have to take frequent breaks to get in bed and do my stretches or else the pain comes back, but the progress I've made in the last couple weeks is nothing short of amazing.  I'm feeling better than I have in over a year, and I'm  able to spend a lot more time up in my chair.  I'm already thinking in terms of doing more stuff, although I don't want to get ahead of myself.  I need to get the pain control a little more consistent than it is right now before I try to go too far from home.  It still fluctuates quite a bit from day to day.

It doesn't help that I need assistance to really do this stretch properly.  Gus helped me rig a strap around my bed to help me do it myself as best I can, but I don't think it's as effective as getting someone to help me do it.  Ideally, I'm supposed to do it every two hours, so if you want to stop by and give me a hand, here's the procedure.

I don't know where we go from here, but the fact that there has been any improvement is both unexpected, and very exciting.