Wednesday, June 04, 2008

My Three Wounds

Some time ago, I got a little carried away at the gym. I pushed too hard, too quickly. Twisting dumb bell presses. Sixty five pounds in each hand. A new personal record. And a brand new injury. My right shoulder has never been the same.

It kept getting worse. It wasn't enormously painful. But it was fairly constant. I took four weeks off from the gym. It improved marginally. But the ache returned after my first day back. With no end in sight.

I had to do something. But there was one thing I didn't want: orthopedic surgery. Greg, at work, had shoulder surgery, and it adversely affected him for months. He couldn't lift his arm above his chest for weeks. And I didn't want to follow his lead. So after talking to Cindy about it, I went to see her boss, Doctor Bensen. She's always told me about the wonderful results she sees in his patients. So I said I'd give it a try.

Here are the finer points:
  • I ended up waiting four hours to be seen. Thank god I brought a book. Unfortunately it was a bad book.
  • My RIGHT shoulder is messed up. Doctor Bensen went to test my "good shoulder," the left one, to measure my strength and range of motion. But while pushing my down my left (remember: good!) arm, my left shoulder abruptly popped out of socket, causing my arm to swing down like a rag doll, and it popped back into the socket at the bottom of the arc. So not only did he diagnose a sprain in my right shoulder, but he suggested that (even though I felt no pain) my left shoulder had a tear.
  • He thought it was odd that I'd have such trauma in my upper torso, and nothing in my lower torso. At which point I mentioned my extremely gnarly lower back. He examined my lumbar region and pronounced that it everything was extremely tense. Abnormally so. And then he discovered the problem. He called it my "hip." I called it, "my ass." In my upper glute, he found another damaged area. At least sprained. At worse, torn. And to compensate, the ache radiates up to my lower back.
So I go in with on complaint, and come out with three wounds.

The current plan is to tackle my right shoulder. And once we see how it responds to prolotherapy (click here for a long discussion on it) then we'll either work on the left shoulder, or my back.

For now, we're off to the beach. And next week, my first round of treatment. If Doctor Bensen can fix all my ailments without surgery, I'll start a religion around him!

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