Referred Relief

Oooh who wants to learn more hip vocab?! It scares me a little how much of this stuff I've picked up over the last few months, but, you know, the more you know! (dum dum dum DAAAH!) My work with Susan, the Wonder PT, got me familiar with the tensor fasciae and illiotibial tract (aka IT Band, which I believe I've bitched about here before!) because that's where we focused a lot of my ultrasound massage and Kinesio taping. Sorting that got me to strengthening my gluteous minimus, which was in pretty rough shape, having been banged around for months in my wonky joint. Still definitely not as strong as I'd like, but I'm getting there, and have now moved on to the illiopsoas - woohoo!

Dr. Hoo started paying attention to my psoas last week when she asked me to tilt my forehead down a bit while I was laying on my stomach and I immediately had searing lower back pain. She had me lie on my back and pressed the heel of her hand against my hip bone while having me lift the opposite leg and try to hold it up against pressure from her other hand. "Your left side is much weaker," she declared (stop the presses, William Randolph Hearst!) and told me she'd need to "take a contact" (NSA terminology for poking me in some manner) halfway between my belly button and hip bone. Thankfully I've become fairly unconcerned about medical professionals fiddling in my pelvic region, so it wasn't too uncomfortable, though it was certainly a bizarre sensation.

As you can see from this nifty cross-section diagram, the psoas essentially connect the base of your spine to your legs, wrapping around and running down the inside of the thigh. And they hurt me all the time! THIS is the answer to my question to Dr. Kim ("What exactly is hurting?") that he didn't know how to answer. After my first psoas adjustment last week, I had a lot of soreness on the outside of my leg and in my left bum, which is unusual for me. It did seem to work out some of the pain of the inside of the joint, though, and I felt a bit more stable, though I had a few choice moments of losing joint function altogether, which is NOT unusual, lucky me! After yesterday's adjustment I definitely had weird pangs and stretching, but not the soreness of the last time, and am feeling like my leg is twisting (or UNtwisting, I suppose) from top to bottom. Which is a weird sensation. :) Good, though, and I think getting better today. And instead of referred pain in my knee (always a strange concept, because medically my knee isn't hurting me, but actually it is) I now have referred relief!

In other news, I have a limp. This may not be a surprise to you, but it is to me more often than you might think. A few weeks back I was having a bad (hip) day and felt like I was just taking it a bit slow and measured when I walked into Royal Orchid and the matriarch immediately asked "What happened to your leg?!" I was crestfallen - here I thought I'd been keeping it such a good secret! haha I had a moment yesterday walking (pretty normally, I thought) down the hall at school when I caught my reflection ahead of me and saw what any Joe on the street would - someone obviously favoring their left side. Curses! It's funny how something like this affects your self-consiousness, though - for a long time I've been of the opinion that people think of you whatever they want, regardless, so you might as well be true to yourself and see who can really hang with that, but this whole hip business catapults that theory into the stratosphere. Yes, I have to turn my body fully perpendicular to the car like an old woman in order to get out; yes, I'm 29 and take the elevator up 1 floor to the chiropractor; YES I LIMP HOW DARE YOU JUDGE ME?! hahaha Also very helpful in checking my own assumptions about other people, I tell you what!

It's a beautiful snowy day in Vermont and I'm sad not to be able to run around in it frolicking like in years past, but I've been pretty crafty around the house in my infirmity and haven't gone stir-crazy at all yet, which is nice. We'll see how I'm doing come March. :)