PT Week One 2016

Welcome back, roughly five years later.

I did an installment of my physical therapy updates in 2011 when I had shin pain lingering from my days as a high school athlete. It was a documentation to basically help me remember what I had done so I could continue doing those exercises and stretches to prevent any more injuries.

BOY that didn’t help much! I’m here again, however.

This isn’t a post to seek attention about my ailments. Personally, I wouldn’t even let people know I had physical ailments. Sounds too attention seeking to me. I do want to continue doing this documentation stuff because it will really get down to what I’m thinking as I go through this process again.

First off, it sucks that I have to go through this process again. Running hasn’t been nice to me the past several years, but it’s the only thing I know how to do. To have pain like this come on and off is certainly demoralizing even if I just want to stay in general shape. To come back to doctors giving me the same answers over and over again doesn’t help because I feel as if I’m going through an endless cycle of getting better and getting hurt. Plus the money that I feel goes down the drain to fund this cycle.

So, let’s get to day one, shall we?

It was the standard introductory appointment, outlining the complete history of my injuries to a physical therapist, again. We continued on to make observations on my walking, take measurements on my lower legs, test the strength of my lower legs, and talking about footwear. No real standout points. My moral is already low here, thinking I have pain, I have a problem, yet there’s nothing to be found.

I got the standard recommendations to do the stretching and exercises I had done from my last round of physical therapy five years ago, so nothing new here, again.

Though we keep coming back to “compartment syndrome”, where the muscle swells too big, causing chronic pain. It’s their last resort diagnosis if four weeks of physical therapy does nothing. They’ll test to confirm that it is what they perceive as compartment syndrome, then perform a fasciotomy to relieve the pressure. That’ll be fun if that happens! Just think about how sad I’ll get because I probably caused it and made it worse by not going to the doctor sooner. My own stubbornness.

For now, as I said before, the same old stretching and exercising just like the last time. Friday, they would like to try the “Graston Technique”, which is taking a tool and more or less massaging the key muscles to either relieve the pressure or break up surrounding scar tissue to try and improve range of motion. Sounds as if that’s going to hurt. Hope I don’t cry.

Let’s move to day two.

No real improvement from day one to day two. Pain scale was about 6.5 by the time I got to the appointment.

Graston Technique? Not as painful as I thought it would be. No crying was involved. I felt no new pain while the massaging was going on and by the time it was done, I didn’t feel any pain at all. Not sure if it’s working or not, however. It’s only the first one and I’ve got 3 weeks worth of sessions left to go.

When we got to stretching, the pain slowly crept its way back up to about a 4.5. It was there, but very subtle. Stretches were basically the same as I was told to do on day one and from five years ago.

As far as exercises go? The only exercise I did was one I remembered from 5 years ago. Stand on a box, have your pain leg on the box, take the other leg and lower heel to the ground , but making sure your pain leg doesn’t lift its heel up. 2 sets of 10. Then ice down.

So week one was relatively lackluster minus my interest in the Graston Technique. Basically I’ll have to measure the pain scale over the course of the week and continue with the stretching and exercises.

Thanks for reading!