A Homage To Physical Therapy
I'm a migraineur, I have been for 13 or 14 years.
At first I thought they were sinus headaches. but one day I was in a doctor's waiting room and took a little test I found in a pamphlet entitled " Do you have migraines".
Lo and behold I did. And being a huge fan of self diagnosing I reported my find to the doctor and he wrote me a script for Imitrex, a medicine that has served me well.
Until the rebound headaches started and I had to take one every day. By the time the big gun headaches hit, my system was so used to the meds they didn't immediately work, leaving me in big gun pain for many hours, sometimes a couple of days.
So against my will I went to a neurologist and she prescribed a 6 day course of steroids with no Imitrex or even Advil to relieve the pain. To start the next day. ( Insert laugh track here, this would be a last resort for me).
I asked for a script for Physical Therapy. My right shoulder and back were chronically sore and doing what I do for a living, repetitive motion with a knife, hauling 5 gallon buckets of water and flowers around, plus what I do for fun, weeding and digging, just made it all worse and I would feel my shoulders and neck get ultra tense and then came a headache.
She wrote it and off I went. At PT we discovered that I basically had no lat muscles on the right side of my back.(maybe having to do with dislocating my shoulder while two stepping one night?) And my pecs and neck muscles did all the work for the lats.
2 months into it and I go 6 or 7 days without a headache, 1 day with a migraine, easily stopped with a pill, then another 5 or 6 pain free.
They massage my neck and shoulders, give me luscious heat wraps and then I stretch and work out with bands and weights to build up the missing muscles.They also play great music, have a steady flow of fun chatter and understand how the body works. And there are no drugs involved.
It's working, it's a miracle, and I haven't had to take the steroids.
If we listen to our bodies and believe what they tell us, there can be happy endings.
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Or at least gardenias.
