Just Call Me The Human Pretzel
Yesterday I had my third physical therapy appointment but I'm still waiting for something encouraging to happen. I'm trying my best to be patient because I realize that these things take time.
My physical therapist is in disagreement with my family doctor as to the root cause of my hip pain. She says emphatically that my hip pain is not caused by lack of exercise (a.k.a karate), rather it's caused by my M.S. I guess it takes someone without a medical degree to make the most sense and see things objectively. She explained that my hip flexor muscles have weakened because of neurologic reasons and that simply stopping my exercise could not cause the amount of weakness that's there. It's not a profound weakness that causes any mobility issues it has just caused my other muscles to overcompensate and therefore cause some rotation in my hips that causes the pain. Whew..I hope that paragraph didn't bore any of you to death.
As far as the pain in my knees is concerned, that's definitely caused by exercise but she seems to think it's fixable. She is setting up exercises for me to do at physical therapy and is tailoring them to the martial arts. For example, since karate is done barefoot she has me do everything in bare feet so my knees will adapt. Basically she's re-training my muscles and tweaking my range of motion. I never knew it was possible to twist my body the way they do. If they keep it up maybe I can join the circus as the human pretzel.
I'm keeping my fingers crossed that it works because I'm in serious karate withdrawl.
posted by Miss Chris | 11:11 AM
9 Comments:
Mmmm, random pain. I find that blaming MS for all my woes only generates more of the same. Conversely when I absolve MS, my family Doctor will shrug her shoulders and proclaim that there is no explaination for my symptoms. Acursed disease, vexing me daily. Alas, there is a solution. make EVERYTHING hurt and you create a level playing field. Really level. Like laying on your back in the kitchen because the tile floor is a wonderful means to wick the heat away from your horribly abused body. :)
Ain't I just a cheery bugger!?
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MS sounds terrible. Probably, MD is worse though.
I too have the hip pain and know it's from the MS. I can feel the muscles pulling at my hip but nah, the doctors say it's just "arthritis" (well how come my x-rays were negative?) and one can see the spasms as they occur?
Hey, I'll try mdmhvonpa's suggestion and lay on my cold cermaic floor to cool off. Heh!
Maybe we ALL just need a "new" disease to blame our discomforts on?!? The only problem is, then EVERY NEW DISCOMFORT will be blamed on that one...bottom line, your friggin' hip hurts. I'd go with the non-medical opinion if it's something that sounds worthy. After all, western medicine is just fine-tuned voodoo anyway. LOL
Linda D. in Seattle
Hello Chris,
the problem with neurological diseases like MS is that where one hurts may not be where one feels the pain...
As for Western medecine, I'd say that for the last fifty years they've made remarkable progress
Think about that, we've had doctors for thousands of years; but for the most part, I wouldn't have trusted them to lance a boil.
Hell, I still don't. They shake their rattles filled with pharmaceuticals, mutter incantations in a very dead language and charge a great deal of money to practice on me.
They treated some English physician (whose name escapes me at the moment,) like a lunatic over his insistence concerning the role of animacules in causing disease, until he friggin' well comitted suicide.
The problem is that, apart from obvious blunt force trauma, doctors still have to be told exactly where it hurts.
(Modern medecine became modern medecine after WWII, when the testing equipment began to outstrip our own ability to describe the symptoms.)
With MS, we may not know exactly where it hurts.
You're dealing with a noisy nervous system.
Any source of noise, any neuronal signal degradation outside of certain tolerances, is going to have some gross effect.
It may be perceived as pain (incoming signals) or spasticity (outgoing signals).
The trick is to discover and map your body's own threshold tolerances.
I'm giving you advice in the opposite direction from mdmhvonpa's.
Instead of treating my body to a general dose of misery, I'd treat it to immersion in a cool salt water bath until I felt absolutely nothing.
Devote an entire evening and just do it. (That's when an iPod would really come in handy. :-)
Then I would examine myself and establish a baseline for all of my physical reactions.
Sense by sense.
Temperature.
Does any part of me feel different from the rest? (My feet always feel cold, even when I know they're not.)
Pressure.
Does any part of me feel different from the rest. (I felt it but was that where the pressure really was.)
When I had my first diagnosed attack in '85, if I placed my hands behind my back I could tell if somebody was pulling on a finger but not only could I not tell which finger but I couldn't even say which hand! (Bladder disfunction is ofter the result of feeling pressure where and when there is no pressure, and vice versa.)
Sensitivity.
Does any part of me feel different from the rest. (Ask your husband to treat you to a prolonged session of "effleurage' [That's a lot better than poking you with a sharp needle :-] That's when he tries to touch you with the least pressure possible and you tell him when you feel something/ [but he's got to write down on an anatomical chart what pressure he applied where (extremely light, very light, barely light, light, firmly, harshly.{And tell him to pay attention. Its not a makeout session...}])
Remember noise, in the signal processing sense of the word, is your enemy.
How about lining them up and side kicking the lot of them?
Kidding.
I seriously hope these things help.
Mat
Chris,
Thanks for stopping by my blog (objectofmyinjection) on blogger. I can't thank you enough for saying hi and giving me a pick me up. Hang in there is my only advice. It seems there always may be too much some days, LOL. Keep your chin up and if that doesn't work, try tape!
HI, You gotta try accupuncture along with Chi Gong and Tai Chi.
It will help a lot and even if it doesn't stop it it will slow it down a good deal.
All of this involves meditation and breathing techniques. The true elixar of life.
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