A Personal Experience
Dear (fellow) Patients,
This month the newsletter is personal. A testimonial from a just-short-of-thirty, overgrown teenager’s first-hand experience with physiotherapy.
A bit about me; while my responsible friends are getting married, buying houses and creating the next generation; I’m still under the delusion that I can make a living from music. My favourite food is junk and my only exercise is skateboarding (with some occasional yoga).
Basically self-care has only recently registered on my radar.
About a month ago I was skating down the pavement (cruising like that ou jolling to Fleetwood Mac), when I felt a little twinge in my lower back.
I got to my car, got in, drove home and attempted to get out of the car – but it didn’t work. As I stood up, attempting to straighten my legs and back; I instantly became a geriatric and toppled over in a heap of pain.
Unbeknownst to me, while I drove, my glutes and lower back had gone into protective muscle spasm causing a sneaky little disc in my back to leave its original snug, happy, little home between two vertebrae; bulging out and squashing my lumbar nerve roots.
Now, I can’t claim to have known this at the time (educating a patient on their injury is a big part of physio), but what I did know is that from Saturday afternoon until Monday morning I was virtually immobile. I couldn’t straighten my legs or back, or walk without a stick. It was about this time that the desire to look after my body proactively pinged into my consciousness.
The Lesson
Fortunately for me, I’ve written enough of these mailers to know that physiotherapy is the first line of defence against virtually all injuries. I was, therefore, at the Harcus Road Practice at 08:00 on Monday morning to see my saviour – Trevllyn! Walking in like a crooked old tree trunk – pointing in all directions at the same time and about to collapse.
Within an hour Trev had mobilised my soft tissue and creaked, pulled and pushed me back into a shape that resembled a human. She finished the treatment with acupuncture teamed with electrotherapy and set me up with a set of crutches. I left upright, slowly, and – as previously mentioned – shellshocked.
I was still in agony but I was also armed with the knowledge I needed to start healing. Very soft slow movements at first (lying in a ball on my back, rolling slowly from side to side) to proper stretching (cat-cow, downward dog, etc) as I began to get better. I’m now doing yoga every morning, getting rid of the ache first then moving onto strengthening movements.
So what’s the point of this self-oriented narrative?
1. Ageing is scary. For real, this is my first experience of my body letting me down for no good reason.
2. If you hurt yourself, start at the physio. This should be taken with a pinch of salt – if you’ve clearly broken your leg, go to the hospital! But in my case, no medicine had helped (painkillers or muscle relaxants), 30 minutes of the correct mobilisation had me on the road to recovery.
3. Being proactive about health is important. Don’t wait for an injury; eat well, move your body as often as possible and get enough rest.
4. Do the exercises that your physio gives you. If physio is the ice cream, then exercises are the cherries on top. Learning how to stretch my glutes and lower back between appointments meant I was able to speed up my recovery significantly and improve my levels of comfort.
Signed,
Finn MacKinnon (the millennial)
A happy, relieved patient.
