When is enough?

Back in Chicago for part of the holidays, so I saw the whole team of people who've helped me deal with my shoulder/hip issues.

Saw the chiropractor on Saturday, and she could tell something was wrong with my pectineus again. However, nothing was wrong with the psoas or anything else.  When she addressed the pectineus, it was like she hit the bulls eye on my target of pain.  So it seems that the source of all of my pain is in that one muscle.

So I saw Dr. Hauser on Monday, and made sure he knew that my hip clicked with internal rotation. He felt it acknowledged it, but when he heard that I was doing ok until I started squatting with weight, he told me something along the lines of, “I can eventually get your hip to stop clicking, but it might be a whole lot easier if you just stop doing squats.”

This was kind of sad news, but it was something that I think I needed to hear. When is enough enough?  These treatments are not cheap, and perhaps I can figure a way to exercise my legs without doing stuff to aggravate my hip.  I’m tired of being in pain, and if I’m doing this to myself, perhaps there is a workaround I can figure out. In the meantime, I think I’ll just avoid doing squats and try other things (think deadlifts are ok, so there’s that.)

Wednesday I saw my massage therapist, and he released the pectineus, and that was super painful.  Everything other muscle he worked on was tight, but nothing like the pectineus.

So now it’s Thursday, and I’ve been moping around for a bit, just running through my mind the whole situation with my hip, I felt like I was at a crossroads and I needed to process everything so that I could make the right decision.  Eventually a new idea came to me: what if all of the pain associated with the labrum has been fixed?  What if my pectineus isn’t tight/painful because it’s protecting a damaged joint?  Before the Oly completion it was pretty much only my psoas.  But then it became apparent that I pulled a groin during the meet, and all of my adductors were hurt, including the pectineus.  What if I strained my pectineus more than originally thought?

I think perhaps I should try to focus on the pectineus as a separate, but related, issue.  Perhaps PRP has taken care of my labrum, perhaps this is just a groin strain that I have been aggravating over the past 14 weeks, making it worse and worse.  I think I may try to seek out an orthopod’s opinion, and see what I can do.  If all my work leads me back to the fact that the pectineus is misbehaving because it’s trying to protect the hip joint so be it, I can go back to PRP or just figure out a way to stop aggravating the hip.  But for now, I feel like this is the right avenue to explore. 

Given that one treats strained muscles with NSAIDS, I actually took an Aleve today.  Then I realized that this will reduce the effectiveness of the PRP that I just paid good money for.  Made me want to get my stomach pumped, but there is nothing I can do now but just not take anything more. At least I only took one, and at my body weight that’s not too much. Still, feel stupid.

Concerning the shoulder, everything seems to be heading in a clearer direction, and all for the better:

Chiro said my C7-T1 were out of whack, like they always are.

Everything seemed to work out with Dr. Hauser, although this time he worked on both sides of my back when I told him that I get  tingling sensations in my ring and pinky fingers in both hands.  He also poked at my shoulder joint with his hand, which hurt a lot, so he addressed that as well.  As of today everything seems to be feeling better.

Got the massage therapist to work on only one muscle in my upper body, and it was my medial scalene.  He worked on it for a minute and my lord the pain was intense before it released. But when it released it was awesome, the therapist commented that my whole shoulder changed after the release.  I need to figure out how to do this on my own, or let the wife figure it out.

So it seems like things are going in the right direction with my shoulder.  I will definitely take this as a victory, I don’t know if I’ve won the war here but I feel like I’m winning some major battles on the shoulder front.