Friday, June 19, 2015

Lift With Your Knees


On Saturday I rearranged my office.  All well and good; I got the boyfriend to help me move my desk, since I was worried that I would snap a leg off.  I didn't think to ask his help with the giant TV (not an LCD TV) and the microwave counter.  I made the mistake of not using my knees to lift, since my right knee has been bothering me for the past few months.

No ill effects, I was totally fine.  Oh yeah, I'm still young!  I can lift with my back and get away with it! I thought.  Unfortunately, this was not the case.

Sunday came with a progressing back pain that was so uncomfortable that I could barely sit through our double feature of Mad Max: Fury Road and Jurassic World.  I managed to walk two miles with my walking buddy (figuring that walking was good and would prevent me from getting stiff) and hobbled on home.

Monday I was still in pain, so I went to the chiropractor.  I love my chiropractor.  He is amazing and I have been going to him since I was fifteen (us tall people seem to have lots of back problems).  He did adjust my lower back, which hurt.  Normally it doesn't hurt.  What did I do to myself?  I promised to take it easy and ice my pain away while I healed.

Tuesday the pain was unbearable.  It had spread across my right side to my hip and up into just under my rib cage.  I couldn't sit, couldn't move without pain.  I iced the butt off of that pain, but it still did no good.  I thought about getting a massage, but it felt inflamed, and touching it hurt worse.  I begrudgingly took two ibuprofen and that smoothed out the pain, sent it to the background.

I'm the kind of person who doesn't like taking painkillers.  When I was in my early teens, I took them often, and in large quantities.  Eventually I was taking eight pills at a time to little to no effect, so I cut myself off of them in college.  I would rather drink water, use pressure points, and stretch in order to get my pain to go away (normally the only pain I ever experience is period cramps, and the most effective way for me to take care of that is to take two maca root and two evening primrose capsules every day for the week before, and then on the first day.  This may or may not work with everyone, as every body is different).

I didn't want to keep taking painkillers for the rest of the week, so I looked up alternative measures.  Along with meditating and releasing endorphins came acupuncture.

Now, I have never been a big fan of needles.  If doctors show me needles, or if I look when they're drawing blood, I have a tendency to either freak out or faint.  The thought of having needles jabbed into me never sounded appealing, but I was so desperate with pain that I was willing to try anything.  I managed to make an appointment for Thursday morning with a licensed doctor of acupuncture.

It was an amazing experience.  I never thought of going to visit a doctor of alternative medicine before, even though that is something that I am totally into nowadays.  I got into the waiting room and they gave me an intake sheet that had everything normal doctors look at to emotional and psychological health.

The doctor suggested stretching beforehand, and used a giant stretching contraption on me.  Basically one belt was cinched around my hips, and the other my ribs, and the machine pulled on the bottom part.  It felt really nice.  I was even able to meditate during it, which was so relaxing.

Then came the acupuncture part.  I began to get nervous, especially when he wanted to show me the needle beforehand. "Don't show, just tell," I said, the writer inside me laughing hysterically.

Acupuncture needles are small and flexible, not much wider than a hair.  Okay, I could deal with that.  After all, I have a tattoo on my lower back, and even though I cried when I got that, I survived.  I could get over one tiny needle stuck into my back.

It wasn't just one needle, it was a bunch of them.  But I barely felt them go in.  It just felt like a light touch, and then it was done.  One of them really tickled when it went in though (I laughed through my tears when getting my tattoo, and the artist thought I was insane), and the doctor said that was normal.  The only other one I felt was the one that went into the back of my right knee (the knee that has been bothering me since January and now I can't feel its pain because my back is so achy).  That needle felt slightly warm after going in, but not in a bad way.

Then he hooked the needles up to an electricity machine.  Oh crap, I thought, I'm going to hate this.  A different chiropractor had used electricity on me before, and I hated it; it made me feel even more tense than before.  But the acupuncture doctor started at 3 volts, and when I said it was too much, he took it down to 1.2 volts, which was just at the edge of my threshold.  It throbbed in the pain center of my back, but like a little mini heartbeat, which was pretty cool.  He then put an infrared heat light over it, and left me for about ten minutes.  I relaxed, meditated some more, until he came back to take the needles out.  Then he swathed on some tiger balm and gave me an herbal patch and broke the bad news; apparently this isn't just muscle pain.  I pulled a ligament or something in my back, which means extra healing time for me.

Even though my back still hurt after my session, I felt incredible in my hip and my ribcage.  I am so pleased with how I feel now.  I do have to go back for a few more sessions, but if I manage to feel this good after the next few, then I am officially hooked on alternative medicine.

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