Ooh, Let Me Do That!

I was at Physical Therapy today for my "frozen shoulder" and, as usual, I was paying more attention to what others were doing than to what I was supposed to be doing.  I guess that's a writer for you.  You are always in the process of observing.

As I did my eight minutes of pulley therapy, I glanced over and there was my fellow sufferer, er, patient, Trixie.  Wait a minute!  Why was she just sitting there reading?  Hey, how did she get to do that?  She had some electronic gizmo attached to her shoulder and she was just sitting there in a chair reading her Kindle.  How come she gets the electrical gadgetry?  This is the 21st century.  I want to be hooked up to some techno-gadget that doesn't involve manual labor.

I looked further down the room and there was a lady sitting in another chair with one foot on a device that looked like a pizza plate balanced on a ball.  Um, guys......can I play "Tilt-a-Whirl" with my foot, too?  I have a broken toe.  It might make me feel better and thus more able to exercise my shoulder.

No such luck.  Instead they added "push-ups" to my routine.  Thank goodness they were only the standing up variety where you do them against a wall.  Hmmm, now if I could read a book while I did them, I might be more motivated.  Of course, when you are only doing five of them, I think I'd only have time to read the chapter title.  Sigh!

As I was mulling this over, I noticed a young man moving down the room on a wheeled office chair.  "Gee," I thought, "that therapist is pretty lazy if he can't even get up and walk down the length of the room."

By the time I saw him pass me the third time and saw that he was wearing a leg brace, I realized that he was a fellow PT patient and this was one of his exercises.  Wow!  I wanted to do that.  I'm ALWAYS going back and forth in my computer room on my chair like that.  Surely if I pumped my arms while I did it, that would be exercising my shoulder, wouldn't it?

Humpf!  My physical therapy team just has no imagination.  Try as I might to divert them to other activities, they just keep focusing on this darn shoulder.  Today they told me that the combination of the scar tissue, the frozen shoulder, and the extra-tight pectoral muscles are STILL making my shoulder area extremely tight.  True, but at least I'm not in pain anymore.  Tomorrow I'm going to get some pectoral stretches.  Oh, joy!  I'll bet it won't involve picking marbles off the floor with my toes.

Who's a Dumbbell Now?

The latest on the Physical Therapy front is that they now say I have a frozen shoulder.  I made the mistake of looking up that term on the Internet and decided I'd better stop reading after I saw things like this:

- Can clear up on its own after around 2 years time.
-Therapy might consist of dislocating your arm from the shoulder cap and then popping it back in numerous times (I'm paraphrasing here but that seemed to be the general gist of it).
-If the therapy proves too painful, a surgeon can do the manipulating of your shoulder and arm while you are under general anesthesia but it is not uncommon for the patient's arm to get broken in the process (Yikes!)

How the heck did my shoulder get frozen in the first place?  I read on.  Seems that it can happen if you injure your shoulder.  I can't remember doing that but who knows?  Maybe I injured it in a "after 20-year" post-chemo brain fog.  Or maybe Mad Cow Disease finally caught up to me after eating that Steak Tartare sandwich in Germany in the 70's and I went on some violent shoulder-whacking binge unbeknownst to me.  Or it could be that folks with hypothyroidism and osteoporosis are prone to these shoulder incidents (more likely in my case).

I think I'll just stick with the physical therapy for now but that doesn't stop me from complaining about it.

"I really wish I could sit around and pick up marbles with my toes instead of having to do those stretchy band exercises, " I was complaining to the Commander.

"You don't have a problem with your toes," he replied.

Hmph!  No sympathy from him.  I tried the same thing on my therapist today.

"If you think picking up marbles will help get you ready for all the band exercises, you can pick up as many as you want," he said.

They have graduated me to two-pound weights for several exercises I do where I lift my arm in different directions.  I've already almost cold-cocked one therapist with the weight (totally by accident) and just missed another's jaw the other day.

They're giving me a wide berth now when they see me with a weight in my hand.  Hmmm, maybe I could work this into a bargaining chip.

"Really, I think I'd be much less of a threat to everybody if you just sit me down at one of those little tables, put an ice pack over my shoulder, give me a nice neck massage, and let me pick up paper clips and put them into a little box for ten minutes," I could say.

Sounds like a plan to me.

Better Than Frozen Peas

Well, I survived my first week of physical therapy (PT) and it hasn't been too bad.  I think I'm making a little progress.  If we were to go by the achiness of my shoulder at the end of the day, we could probably say that we're making great progress.

Since I've been feeling a dull ache after doing the exercises, I've been trying to ice down the sore area.  That's not easy when you're a knitter and a typist.  I've tried wrapping up a bag of frozen veggies in a towel and holding it on the sore spot but it doesn't stay in place unless I keep on holding it.  I can't knit or work on the computer with one hand......at least not easily.

One of my friends who is a physical therapist was telling me the other day about a homemade frozen gel pack that I could make from two bottles of dish soap poured into a Ziploc bag.  Then you double-bag it and stick it in the freezer.

I was doing fine on making my own gel pack until we got to the freezing it part.  It wasn't too stable in its "unfrozen" state and I wanted to lay it flat in the freezer.  I could have taken it down to the big chest freezer and found a spot to lay it flat but I solved the problem by putting it on a wire cooling rack.  This gave it stability.

Then I jury-rigged a spot in our refrigerator freezer by stacking some food boxes to make a flat and level surface and placed the cooling rack with the makeshift gel pack on top of the boxes.  Voila!  Now I'm just waiting for it to freeze enough to apply to my shoulder.

Ah, and I noticed today at PT that the therapists were putting their official gel pack into pillowcases and then letting folks sling them over their shoulders to ice them down.  Actually, you could sling them anywhere you wanted to ice something down but the folks I happened to notice today were all icing shoulders and doing it without having to hold the pack in place.  I'm going to try the pillowcase myself at home.  It seems like it would be much easier to work with than a big towel.

So there you have it.  If you need an ice pack and your insurance isn't providing you with one or you don't want to go out and buy an expensive one, try to make your own.  In the meantime, here's to pain-free days!

Stocking Up on Ben Gay

My shoulder has been bothering me for a month and a half now.  I finally had gone to the doctor who thought it was bursitis and prescribed anti-inflammatory drops.  I had told her that I did NOT want a cortisone shot nor did I want surgery.  After doing the drops for awhile, there still was no improvement so I bit the bullet and called her again and this time we decided to try some physical therapy.

Now it's been over twenty years since I last had physical therapy.  My PT had lasted exactly one session.  It was the same day I had my staples removed after the mastectomy for breast cancer.  I'll never forget that session.  The therapist was a real gem......NOT!  He was actually a bully and about as unfeeling as a rock.  I was taken to PT directly after having the staples removed and the first thing the guy did was have me lay down on a table and then he said, "Let's see how far you can move your arm."  Before I could even do anything, he grabbed my wrist and pulled my arm completely back above my head and down to the table.  I screamed.

"Oh, don't be such a baby!  Do you want that shoulder to freeze up?" he said.

The session went downhill from there.  When I got back to my room, I was in tears.  I told the nurse what had happened and she told my doctor and he pulled me out of PT and that was my one and only experience with physical therapy.  So naturally, I was a little nervous about going into the lion's den again after all these years.

I showed up yesterday, logged in and sat in the waiting room listening to two ladies in assorted braces swapping war stories.  I was praying that whoever came out to call my name would be a.  female and b. kindly and jolly.  When I heard my name called, they were neither.  It was a big, burly guy dressed in dress slacks, shirt and tie.  Not exactly my mental image of a physical therapist.

We went back to his office and sat down and he went over my completed paperwork.  I told him what kind of movements gave me pain and then he said, "Let's have you stand up and I'll check your posture."

I stood up and before I could even suck in my stomach, he took one look and said, "Oh, oh.....I think I can see what the problem is right now."  Yikes!  So he pushed and prodded on my shoulder area and the back of my neck and then told me to lay down on the table.

"Um, I don't do too well lying flat on tables," I told him.  "You know, it's the way my back is shaped.  It doesn't lay flat."

"It's called a dowager's hump," he replied.

Well, thank you, Mr. Sunshine.  As if I didn't know what this Quasimodo that I've been carrying around on my upper back for the past 20 years is called.

He moved my arm around and took measurements.  Ow!  Ow!  At least this fellow eased up when I'd say OW!

Then I had to sit up and try pushing against his hands in different directions.  I misunderstood him at one point and pushed in a direction he wasn't anticipating, ending up punching him in the stomach.

"Ooof!", he groaned.

"Sorry," I said.  "That's for that one measurement that really hurt."

The consensus was that my shoulder pain was NOT from bursitis.  It was actually from several factors.  The scar tissue from my mastectomy years ago and the hunching over of my shoulders from years of bad posture, sitting at a computer desk, and the deterioration of my bones from osteoporosis was causing my shoulder tendon to get pinched during certain movements.  My range of motion in that arm was now less than half of what it should be.

Finally it was time to go out into the main room and try some exercises.  He would demonstrate an exercise and then let me repeat it myself for 15 reps.  I was doing one with this rubberized band that made me think of a left-handed Heil Hitler salute when he came over to ask me how it was going.  Bad timing.  I was right in the middle of pulling my arm up.  POW!  My fist got him right in the jaw.  Oops!

He turned me over to his assistant, a nice young college intern.  Now SHE was a bubbly person.  She showed me how to do an exercise for the upper trunk and I began my reps.  Hmmm, I thought.  This is exactly like one I used to do all the time when I was a teen.  "Hey," I whispered to her, "This is the old 'We must, we must, we must increase the bust' exercise.  Every woman knows this one."

"You're right!", she laughed.

By this time, I had noticed two women peddling away on some stationary reclining bikes in the middle of the room.  They were both reading on Kindles.

"I want whatever exercise THEY'RE doing," I said to my therapist.  "Then I can read on my Kindle."

"There's nothing wrong with your legs", he replied.

I did another exercise where I stood facing sideways to the rubber band and then was supposed to pull the band straight-armed down to my hip and then back up at a 90-degree angle.

"Um, what if my hips are extra big?" I asked my therapist.  "It seems like I won't be getting the full benefit of this exercise because I could stop a lot sooner than the normal person."

He looked at me for a long moment.  "Work with me here," he finally said.

"It's the Van Rossum hips," I whispered to his assistant.  She grinned.

It wasn't long before we were finished and I was given the option of icing my shoulder there or waiting and doing it at home, if it became sore.  I opted for home.  I could swear that my therapist looked a tad relieved.

I'm heading back over today and tomorrow for more therapy.  Should be interesting.  This is almost as much fun as yoga class and I don't even have to do that darn Downward Dog.