I went to see the PT again yesterday. I was mentally geared up for another murder session like the first one, and, y’know, she worked me over really well. Softened me up, and then went to really start the heavy duty work on my shoulders and…
There’s an Impossible Knot in my left trapezius, which she’d loosened up last time by going through my armpit. (Oh god the pain, but it was amazing.) Anyway, so she went after the knot yesterday without going through my armpit first, and I mean, she’s, like, got a vise-grip pinch on it, right? There’s no other word for what she was doing except ‘pinch’. And I’m figuring, “Okay, so she’s gonna pinch it for a minute here and then she’ll go through the armpit,” which is basically what she did last time.
Except after maybe 20 seconds of pinching, the knot and the muscle went FLIBBA FLOOBA FLOOB and shuddered all the way down my shoulder toward my spine as it loosened up. I was like WAIT WHAT? and said “Holy crap, there’s some residual improvement from the first session, which was a whole month ago! I thought we’d be starting from scratch!”
PT was like, nah, I told you, three sessions or so, and I was like but you said three sessions IN A ROW!
Anyway, so I was enormously heartened by that and immediately started thinking about actually practicing yoga. Look, IDK, it just made sense to me.
And THEN, instead of spending what felt, in the first session, like two YEARS on each armpit, causing me breath-taking pain, she spent like…two minutes on each pit. Or maybe five, but by comparison to last time it was nothing. In fact, she got done with one and I said, “Is that it? Are you sure you’re doing this right?” which made her laugh and promise me she was sure, she did this about seven times a day. “But it’s so much less awful!” I protested, and she told me I was much less frozen up and well on my way to recovery.
And I tell you what, I didn’t spend the rest of the day doing the 3CP0 walk, and my armpits aren’t nearly as sore this time as they were last time, but my shoulders feel as good as they did last time. Better, even, because last time I literally spent the next two days feeling weird around the shoulders because they were so much looser and it was like my body didn’t know what to do with that. And they’re looser now, too, but the degree isn’t as dramatic and I don’t feel as weird, because I’m apparently looser overall than I was before the first session.
AND THEN I was heading over to see a friend, and walked by The Back Shop, which always has cool looking, comfortable looking chairs in it, and in the window they had a chair that looked *exactly* like what I need to replace my writing chair*, which is about 15 years old now and is making my butt numb when I sit in it very long. I can’t replace it right now, but it was SO HEARTENING to see *exactly* what I need. It’s all giving me hope that I can get myself into better condition and then not exacerbate old injuries with less-than-ideal working conditions.
*No, I’m not replacing the cool arm-mounted fully split keyboard, just the chair. But that means I need a chair with post arms that the keyboard can be mounted *on*, which will also give me back support and all the rest of it.