Sit down, sit down, sit down you’re rocking the boat.

Went to physio this morning, and as my normal physio Heather is now on holidays and the guy I was seeing to replace her, Johnno,  was also  now on holidays, I ended up seeing a third physio, Georgie, this time…. and I may as well not have bothered.  Now I’ve been poked and prodded quite a lot by physiotherapists over the years, and one of the drawbacks of this is that I’m used to being poked and prodded and have quite gotten out of the habit of squealing when they apply pressure that produces excessive or acute pain.  I find I mostly lay there and just… take it.  It’s awful to think that I’m so familiar with painful sensations that they no longer produce an audible reaction, but there  you have it. 

Anyway both Number 1 physio, Heather and Number 2 physio, Johnno have a tendancy to keep on prodding and ramping up the pressure because if I don’t squeal, then I must be coping okay with what they’re doing which suits me fine, because the more aggressive they can be while I am on table, the more benefit I seem to get out of it in remaining mobile afterwards.  But Georgie I think was just pussyfooting around for some reason, maybe because she couldn’t tell if she was hurting me or not.  I kept telling her it was okay to apply more pressure, but for whatever reason, she just didn’t.  So I walked out of there feeling no looser or more mobile than I did when I walked in, which is a bit of a waste of time really.  So I’m still all tense this afternoon and unfortunately, my next two appointments are with her because the others are still on holiday.

Another bit of back related fun… the Workcover people and my GP want me to go off for some pain management counseling and for the first time ever I am in agreement with them.  I feel I am totally not coping with my current levels of back pain, I’m not sleeping, I’m freaking out that it’s not going to settle back down to what I consider ‘normal’, I’m frequently tearful about the whole damn mess and have become ridiculously fearful on the road when driving…. oh and I may or may not have said something about just wanting to curl up and die… by way of trying to demonstrate how fed up I was with the entire situation, and well the quacks tend to take that sort of thing seriously.  My GP recommended someone to go talk to, but that person has refused to accept me as a patient because they don’t want to deal with the Workcover paperwork.  So I inform the Workcover people of the situation and I get back an email from them that goes something like this –

I am on leave over the break and will be back at work in the new year so please have a fantastic Christmas and a safe New Years Eve.

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