Bring on the Cheerleaders

I started physical therapy for my back on Thursday. As you may recall, in a stunning feat of grace and loveliness, I slipped and fell under Willem’s truck in early January. I’m not broken, but I’m not getting better, and I have vacations planned for next month… so PT it is.

I’m starting with very simple stretching exercises because, in the words of the physical therapist, “You’re really tense!” Um, yeah, you think? Something about making the wrong movement and ending up with pain shooting up out of the top of my head and leaving scorch-marks on the ceiling, I think.

One of the stretches is more of a clench: I’m to try and pull my belly button back to my spine and then do a Kegel and hold for 10 seconds. Not a problem, right? Except apparently I was doing Kegels all wrong, making more of a push motion than a pull, and had to be retaught. Since she mostly kept her hands to herself, and certainly didn’t get up close and personal enough to require an R rating, I’m not sure how she could tell the difference, because I sure can’t.

The next stretch is to lie flat on my back, legs straight, and pull one knee at a time up toward my chest, holding under the knee and pulling. Not a problem, for real, this time. I can do this. It doesn’t feel like it’s doing much of anything at all, stretchwise or therapywise, but whatever. Like a good student, I’ll do my homework three to five times a day.

The third stretch just about kills me. I’m to remain on my back, left leg bent with knee raised, right ankle resting on the left knee. Then reach with my right hand and pull the right knee across my body. Holy Mother of Pain, Batman. Not in my back – no, that would be too simple – but in my hips. I was diagnosed with bursitis in both hips when I was 14, went to PT for a year or so, and got it under control. It hasn’t been a serious problem since then; once in a while, in certain awkward positions and weather conditions, one hip or the other will seize up and hurt like crazy for a few minutes, but then it fades into a mere annoyance for a while and goes away completely. But this simple little stretch has flared up the bursitis – and it happened before Saturday’s re-fall, so I can’t blame that – to the point that I’m walking like John Wayne even when I haven’t been riding a horse. Which I never do.

Good times.

Today was my second PT session, and we all agreed that I can stop doing that third stretch unless I decide to pick up masochism as a hobby. I started with some sort of electrical stimulation on my lower back, which was not what I expected it to be. When I was 14, I had some sort of shock therapy on my hips, with a little wand that delivered sharp pain to each one and generally was on par with a dental visit, fun-wise. This, instead, consisted of four electrodes on my lower back, for ten minutes, with sort of waves of itching or fuzziness pumping through them every 20 seconds or so. Didn’t hurt, but didn’t make it better, either.

So I’m frustrated and down, right now, because I’m starting to worry about how long this is all going to take. I’m going to Florida and Jamaica next month, and sometime soon I hope to be pregnant (and did I mention that I got nasty sciatica with both pregnancies, too? Won’t that be fun?). I really, really need this back pain to settle and go away. I’m doing what I can, following their rules to the best of my ability, alternating ice and heat and stretching and not restricting my daily activities, so maybe what I need is a cheering squad to keep morale up. Because right now, it’s decidedly down.