I had a new physio this morning, as mine is off traipsing the Cradle Mount Lake St Claire walk in Tasmania this week. I thought the whole ideology of physiotherapy was based around making you feel better? After this morning I have my doubts though because this afternoon, I swear I feel worse. I didn’t think the substitute physio guy was as aggressive as my normal chickie, but I am feeling rather battered and bruised about now. Every time I go in there, they check out my range of movement, by getting me to do some simple exercises moving my head about to see where stiff or sore – which feels kinda like an old dried up rubber band being overstretched, as I have a tendency to avoid these types of painful neck stretching movements at home. Then it’s off with the shirt and onto the table so they can dig their pointy little fingers into my rock hard neck muscles to try and get the vertebrae moving. And fuck it hurts. I’m sitting here trying to come up with the words or some imagery that would allow a quantitative comparison as to how much it hurts exactly – but short of some of Mapplethorpe’s male genital torture photographs …no suitably painful enough imagery comes to mind. Right about now, you’re probably pleased I couldn’t find a copy of the particular image that I was thinking of. 🙂
Over the years my tolerance for pain has gotten better… for example, my back pain was really really bad when I was pregnant with Angel – I had pain radiating down into my hands, and really bad pain in my lower back that simply would not go away and could not be ignored. As the pregnancy progressed it got worse and worse. My OB/GYN gave me natal safe pain killers and eventually was giving me some mild sedatives too as I was in so much pain that I was unable to sleep more than a couple of hours. After a while, these didn’t seem to be having any effect at all and he was suggesting that I might try washing them down with a couple of glasses of red as this could help (I remember saying to him when he suggested I mix pain killers and sedatives with alcohol, “You do remember that I’m pregnant right?”).
Anyway, nothing seemed to alleviate the pain and I was getting really anxious about whether or not things would subside back to ‘normal’ when the baby was born. Angel was eventually born early by c-section delivery and problem solved. Back pain subside back to normal overnight. The day after Angel was born, I was wandering around the hospital ward and ran in to my OB who was stunned to see me out of bed and we had a conversation that went something like this –
OB: What are you doing out of bed?
Me: I feel great, my back pain is all back to normal and all I have is a dull ache now.
OB: But how about your tummy?
ME: Ummm yeah… I have what I’d call a ‘mild abdominal discomfort’, but other than that I’m okay. 🙂
His jaw dropped and his eyes just about popped out of his head and then he dragged me around the ward to visit several other of his c-section patients who had been laid up in bed for days. Something tells me he wasn’t taking me too seriously when I was complaining of pain during the pregnancy….
I guess what I am trying to say is… the pain I am dealing with since this last accident is worse then what I was dealing with during my pregnancy, it has been going on for two and a half weeks now, and I am starting to worry that it won’t subside back to ‘normal’.
.