Life After Bagels

Oospie!  Forgot to post yesterday.  And by forgot I mean I didn’t have one single second!  Being back in the thick of school has been intense.  Take yesterday for example, I went to stats class, then went straight to the library to work on stats homework, then went to stats tutorial.  Add it all up – that’s nine straight hours of stats.  Say stats again.

Stats.

Stats with instragram filter:

I had a laptop free day yesterday.  I had to jump on my desktop first thing yesterday morning but after that – no computer!

Before I started my stats marathon I went to my first treatment appointment.  It was a combination of testing range of motion, strengthening exercises, and having the chiropractor push & pull on my hip.

It was a good appointment, I learned a lot, he likes to use diagrams and even busted out the skeleton to talk about my hip.  It’s half physical therapy, half science lesson

My Ride for Heart training will continue as planned.  According to the doctor, the point of this treatment is that we want to continue my regular physical activity without interruption.  He made it clear that rest will not heal this injury.  If anything, rest will weaken the muscles that are actually working properly.  The goal is that I continue my usual activities, but with modifications on my movement.

All of my movements are supposed to be deliberate.  Things like walking, stairs, picking up things off of the floor, sitting down, all need to be adjusted.  What I’ve realized is that this will take time.  I’ll need to slow down.  But I already jam EVERY SECOND of my day full, how can I slow down?  (Thus the title: how do you solve a problem like a tasmanian devil?)

I’m waiting for my Dad to leave a comment reminding me that he’s been telling me to slow down since I was 15 years old.  It’s true.  If efficiency and work output were an olympic sport I’d have approximately five million gold medals and hold the world record.  I should wear a button around on my shirt that says “I get more work done than you.”

But in the words of the ever wise Dr. Phil “how’s that working for you?”

It’s not.  Obviously.  Aside from being stressful, it’s not going to contribute to my rehabilitation whatsoever.  I’m not sure if the doctor saw my efficiency button or what but he specifically told me “do not rush through your exercises.”  Me?  Rush?

In theory, this should be easy right?  Cut down my to do list, schedule less work, meetings, events, etc.

But in practice this has never worked for me before.

HELP?!?!?!?!

WOW!!!!!  The grand total of top bids from my auction yesterday was:

$471

Thank you so very much for all of your support.  A few of those dollars is going towards Brad’s fundraising goal since he is also riding.  Once all of the bids come in I’m going to be alllllllmost at that $1000 mark.

Wooohooooooo!

Now that the fundraising is taken care of I’ll be concentrating on the training.

Unfortunately, the fundraising was the easier part.  The training is going to be a little bit difficult.

Yesterday afternoon, as you guys were getting hot and heavy over the auction, I visited the sports doctor.  My sore ankle from the car accident wasn’t really bothering me too much but I kept my appointment anyways because I knew that I should get my hips and knees checked out.

I don’t talk often or in depth about the problems with my knees and hips.  Usually I just roll it all together and say “I’ve got bad joints.”  The reason I haven’t written much about my pain before is that I never really had a diagnosis.  I didn’t know what to tell anyone except that it hurts, a lot.  I experience pain in my left knee and my right hip daily.

I’ve had the knees and hips checked out a bit before by doctors at the clinic.  Last summer my new family doctor did a full examination.  I had a bunch of blood tests and what seemed like a billion X-rays.  Everything came back fine which meant I didn’t have, for example, arthritis, and the X-rays were totally clear.

After all of those tests came back I pretty much gave up on figuring out what was wrong and continued managing my pain daily.

Like I mentioned last week, after telling my family doctor about my training for the Ride for Heart and my sore ankle he decided to refer me to a clinic that specializes in professional athletes.  Yesterday I actually saw a chiropractor.  He did a very lengthy examination.  It involved watching the way I did certain movements, how I walked, how I went up and down the stairs.  He manipulated my legs into many a positions to test for pain, he tested for strength, and always my least favourite part of an exam – pushing on the sore parts.

Finally we got the the diagnosis.  There were diagrams.  I think I blacked out for parts of it.  To be honest my pain problems are an an extremely emotional issue.  The doctor told me that the issues were complex and the treatment would be multifaceted.

The knee: patella tendinopathy - at a very severe stage

The hip: he didn’t have a specific diagnosis but said that it was a very bad strain and that all of the muscles around the hip were tight and pulled

The treatment is going to involve a lot of strengthening and stretching.  He told me that we need to start at the core and go all the way down to the feet.  Some of my issues involve certain core muscles that aren’t strong enough, my left ham string is too short, sensors in my feet that don’t function normally.  Aside from the strengthening and stretching the doctor needs to help me retrain my body to do all of the regular movements that people do in a day.  For example – sitting, using the stairs, getting out of a chair, walking.

We’re starting with four weeks of treatment with two visits a week and reassess my treatment plan after that.  I’ll see him again tomorrow morning for my first treatment.  We’re going to talk about my training plan then.  The frequency and intensity of training may change or may stay the same, but my stretching and icing routines are definitely going to change.

I know it seems like a no brainer to get treatment and I’m sure some of you are thinking that I should have gotten it sooner.  But like I said, this is all such an emotional issue that I am guilty of sticking my head in the sand and hoping it would go away sometimes.  Plus this is a pretty big financial strain.  Some of the treatment will be covered by Brad’s benefit plan thankfully but we’ll bear some of the cost.  With our very limited income this is going to be hard and we’ll have to juggle quite a bit to make it happen.

Harrrummpphhhh.  That was a mouthful wasn’t it.  I commend you if you’re still reading.  I’ve gotten a lot of reader questions about my joint pain before and I never really had a good answer so I wanted to be able to write this post.  Plus this is going to factor in to my training of course.

Thanks for listening everyone