Is this too warped? It was such a relief when the doctor said, "Oh, man! You are SO messed up! You are in terrible shape!"
My tailbone began hurting the last weekend of March. It's been hard to be sitting, hard to get up and sit down, hard to carry things, impossible to run. There for a while it was taking several minutes to haul my body out of bed to a vertical position. I figured I'd bruised my tailbone, and that takes a long time to heal. But it's been four months now. How long am I supposed to be patient?
This weekend I saw a blogpost about the mental-health benefits of exercise. That's what I experienced in the four years that I was jogging two miles daily. But then I had to cut way back because of some [hopefully temporary] bad ramifications for physical health. In April I had to cut out all exercise because of the back pain from my injured tailbone. But after a while, you've got to balance the good the exercise does against the bad it does, ... and so I went out race-walking for just one little mile today. I've got to get back into it.
I also saw the doctor today. After checking for cysts, rashes, or other possible signs of injury to the tailbone, he checked my alignment. (I feel like a Buick.) That's when he burst out with "Oh, man, you are SO messed up." But that's good. If my back is out of whack, he can straighten it. He said he'd never seen my legs so uneven and my hips and pelvis so locked. There was plenty of wincing and gasping in pain, which incited the doctor to a speech about the necessity of anti-inflammatories [read: aspirin and/or Advil] even if I'm not hunting for pain relief.
The doctor straightened my back, popped a pelvic disk back into place, and gave me therapy exercises to keep working on popping that disk into place. He said it's been messed up for so long that I'm going to have to keep convincing it to get back where it belongs.
I am SO sore now, but there's hope that the pain of the past few months isn't just a slow-healing bruise. It's mis-alignment that is relatively easy to correct. Maybe in another week or so I won't be so pokey as I go about my tasks. Maybe I won't ache so much. And maybe I can get back to my jogging and the benefits it brings.
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I know it costs money, but I would recommend going to the chiropractor once a month after you get straightened out. Even if you're not in pain, it's important to keep going to stay in alignment. We consider the money we spend at the chiropractor to be well spent-I never want a doctor to tell me that I'm SO messed up!
ReplyDeleteDid you ask what several days in a car would do to your back?
ReplyDeleteComing from a chiropractic background...I agree with "Ewe". I loathe taking medications of any kind unless absolutely necessary - so I always start with the chiro...and a very good one will tell you, "this is beyond my ability and you need medication, etc."
ReplyDeleteMany insurance plans are now covering portions of chiropractic treatments.
Lisa & Ewe, do I at least get brownie points for going to the D.O. before I went to a regular doctor? Our insurance does cover chiropractic, but even those small co-pays make it out of the question for us to be able to go regularly. That's one of the reasons we like our D.O. (even when he's been out-of-network for insurance) because he'll do the alignment that a chiropractor would do, but does it once and I don't have to go back until something else is wrong, which may be a month or may be two years. The problem this time was not going in because of thinking that this wasn't an alignment problem.
ReplyDeleteYup - brownie points for the D.O.! Like I said, a good DC recognizes that sometimes medication IS necessary - and I choose to beleive that the DC becomes a D.O. for that very reason!
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