Holy mother of frogs am I tired.
I got up at about 5am to do an arguably insane thing I do every once in a while, which is travel half the length of the country (literally: it’s 250km to drive there, and from the northern tip of the Republic to the southern tip, it’s about a 550km drive, BUT because the train is not direct, it’s probably more like 300km of travel one way) to visit my very excellent PT. It’s expensive and time consuming and it’s possible that each of the two or maybe three times I’ve done it since we moved to Sligo I’ve said I can’t do this again, it costs too much.
And then she heals me with a laying on of hands and I’m like “maybe one more time…”
I’ve had joint pain in my left shoulder for A While Now. Like doing fairly ordinary things, lifting or reaching for something, not even a heavy thing, strains it. Putting weight on it to roll over in bed. Grabbing something quickly. Basically normal stuff hurt all the time, and nothing I’ve tried has particularly helped. I’ve been really afraid there’s something genuinely wrong with the joint. The PT, as she always does, asked what needed working on, and I mentioned it in passing, but the pain is in the joint, so I really didn’t think she could do anything about it. I knew she could do something about the other stuff, though, which is why I went.
As I was lying down on the massage table, I was really having a hard time finding a comfortable position to put my left arm into, though, so it became evident to her that it was An Issue. And after she fixed most of the other problems (my FEET had knots. my feet NEVER had knots. I’m deeply offended!), she turned her tender, by which I mean brutal, ministrations on my shoulder.
First she checked to see what my range of motion was like, where it started hurting. Then she worked on me a while, checking my range of motion throughout, and IMPROVING IT NOTICEABLY with each new effort.
Me: I REALLY thought this was a JOINT problem
Her: well, it is, but it’s not like an ARTHRITIC joint problem. Your upper pectoral muscle and (some other muscle) is very, very tight, and it’s pulling the joint forward in the socket, so that’s why it hurts in the joint and not the muscle. But we can fix that.
And she did. I don’t have the full range of motion back, but it’s 90% there, and she says it’ll loosen up more over the next few days as the muscle relaxes after being pummeled and released from the tension it had built up. She gave me some exercises to start in a couple days after the initial “you’ve been tenderized” soreness fades.
Even if she hadn’t sorted out the horrible tension in my right hip flexor, it would have been worth going across the country just for the shoulder fix. I really, really didn’t think that one was going to be solved, like, ever. I was afraid it was just a Problems With Aging thing, that it was going to be a surgical solution if there was any solution, but, um, no, I just needed to go see my magic PT.
Which is why I get up at 5am and sit on trains for 10 hours to see her. I obviously do need to find somebody closer to me for more regular maintenance work, but…damn. I’m so relieved I could cry.
And also, my right hip flexor doesn’t hurt anymore. I was really surprised; I thought my hips were all out of joint because my gait was obviously messed up, but my hips were unexpectedly level. However, my entire right hip, front and back, was HORRIFICIALLY tight, and she thought it was that tight because it was struggling to keep everything level, so ITS tightness was messing up my gait. But now it’s looser and I can start stretching again, and I can walk smoothly, AND I KEEP DOING THINGS WITH MY LEFT ARM AND THEN PREPARING FOR THE PAIN/REGRET AND IT DOESN’T COME!!!
I really needed that. I slept like a log afterward. And also, OMG, I remain so very, very tired.
(It was, I said, having looked it up and wanting to note it for my own future knowledge, the acromioclavicular joint where the pain was; the tight muscles were the clavicular and sternocostal heads (which she said, I just couldn’t remember), with some trouble from the deltoid where it wraps around to the front. She kept asking me to point to where the pain was, and after the third or fourth go at my shoulder and the subsequent test of the range of motion, where I pointed to (making contact with my own skin as I did so) it turned out the pain was DIRECTLY BENEATH the place she’d been digging into, imagine that. And now that I’m looking at the anatomy of the shoulder, I can see that the acromioclavicular joint is EXACTLY THERE. So this has been interesting for me.
Also I have a REALLY SPLENDID bruise, not actually in exactly that place, but slightly to the side of it where she obviously also did a lot if digging in.)