I hate to say it, but I'm back to square minus-one with my hip. The level of discomfort and pain has got so bad at this point that I finally succumbed and went to the doctor today. Unfortunately, the news is not exactly positive.
I have pain in my right butt-cheek that radiates around my hip joint and down my leg to my knee. My IT band "snaps" frequently, my knee pops all the time, and my hip socket is constantly clunking around. The joint itself just feels unstable and unhappy. I have referred pain in my lower back and I'm still getting stabs of pain across my pubic bone. I'd say that, with one thing or another, I have a constant level of pain of around 3-4 out of 10. Yes, you can see why I picked up the phone and made an appointment.
As I've said many a time before, I'm so lucky in that my PCP is also a "D.O", a Doctor of Osteopathy. This makes her uniquely placed to evaluate my particular type of physical malady. With a few pushes and prods here and there, she was able to determine that my psoas, IT band, and Tensor Fasciae Latae are all extremely tight on the right side, and overall my right hip has significantly less range of motion than my left. She feels I will definitely benefit from loosening these muscles and tendons, however the "clunking" I described to her, and the level of tightness, do suggest to her a continued skeletal impingement.
So, in short, exactly what I had surgery for just 16 months ago.
If there was a way to truly vent the level of my frustration here on the blog, you would see many cuss words, grrrs, arrgghhs, and 'virtual' sniffles. However, I'll save you. I'm sure you can imagine how this would be frustrating, upsetting, and darn-right disheartening.
The treatment right now is a combination of traditional physical therapy (which we all know I thought was a waste of time through my medical group/insurance after the surgery) and (lucky for me this time) a course of treatments with the new chick in town - an Osteopath that is trained in Osteophathic Manipulative Medicine. Basically it's another form of physical therapy and theraputic massage (I'm vastly oversimplifying here.) According to my doc, she's the only one in Sacramento and she just recruited her personally from the bay area - the new chick was one of her star students when she was chief resident at another hospital.
We'll see where all this takes us and leaves us but the bottom line is that, with a weakness in this hip, I'm probably looking at a lifetime of maintenance and injury prevention. Which is just depressing when you're only 34. Likely more than half of my life is going to spent massaging, stretching, and manipulating myself against pain. There are days right now when I feel like I'm already in my 60s, wincing as I get up out of a chair or holding onto a railing just to get up stairs, so I can't imagine the pains I'll be experiencing by the time body actually starts to go downhill.
Right now, though, I'm just focusing on getting back to being active and reducing my overall pain. I would like to be able to "hang" with Daisy as she gets older. Right now I can barely walk around the block, let alone play soccer or roll around in the grass with her.
Sigh...
3 comments:
Oh sweetheart, I so so feel for you. You might also be having some additional pain b/c of the extra weight and pressure that pregnancy put on your hip, and it might take a while for that resolve itself. I am very encouraged by the new chick in town, she sounds promising!
Once you get in the groove, let's talk about food and see if you might be interested in toying with the idea of raw food. I know it sounds gross, but I swear to you I'm only about 50% raw and it makes a huge difference in the level of inflammation.
Of course, I'm only offering if you're interested in hearing more about it. Whatever you take on now has to work for you and you have your hands full with a baby and work without adding more to the list of stuff to handle, right?
I'm totally with you and for you. You know I throw out ideas in the hope something will help, but don't listen to anything that doesn't sound like it would work for you.
Honestly, I'd have to be fairly desparate to consider raw food. At least that's how I feel right now. Although, I never say never. About as raw as you'll get me is strawberries and apples. Haha. On the other hand, I do think that I can definitely eat more healthfully and less processed food - I know when I made an effort to do that in the past, it made a big difference to my energy level and overall state of well-being. It would also help me loose weight, so a win-win. The challenge is finding the time and energy to eat right, especially when you have a husband that will only eat fast food or rib-stickin' home cookin'. I am interested in the Alexader/ra technique you have been using, however. But one thing at a time... I need to know what's working and why, PLUS, all that extra stuff costs money and baby needs diapers, you know?
I know what you mean about the raw food. But consider that there is a hypothesis that arthritis and other typical old age diseases are actually cooked food diseases. I don't know whether that is true, but I am certain that whatever ails you is made exponentially worse by processed food. So maybe raw is too big of a step, but the switch to healthy is a good start.
For me, the pain was a really big motivator. Really big. And not eating a lot of crap doesn't feel like much of a sacrifice.
But like I said, it's all about what works for you. I know about all this stuff costing money. I don't have a kid and I had to do things one by one.
I did really benefit from Alexander Technique. Here's the link http://www.alexandertech.org/.
Anyway any time you want to chat about food, even if it's just ideas for a salad, let me know.
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