Possibly the last treatment for my right hip????

Well, hopefully these next few months will be my last series of posts dealing with hip pain.  I think I’ve finally resolved the last piece of the puzzle, at least concerning my right hip.  I saw Dr. Fullerton this past Friday, and having been tired of him addressing my shoulder and then running out of time to address my hip, I decided to make this appointment all about the hip.  He went through the notes from past visits, and asked to see my side lunge.  

The side lunge is a stretch that I can do very easily with my left hip, but not so easily with my right side.  I can’t do it on the right side because my groin is too tight, nor is it easy to balance. So after seeing the imbalance with the stretching, he then did some injections around my inguinal crease (some of the damage was underneath my femoral artery/nerve) and then had me try it again.  This time I could do it a lot better because my groin wasn’t tight, but I still couldn’t balance like I could on my left side.  He then performed some injections on the more outer part of my hip, and then this time when I tried it I could stretch my right leg just like my left leg. 

It was ridiculous how easy it was to perform that stretch on my right side.  I remember showing the asymetry to a PT and he was like “well maybe over the years your hip has adapted to various pathologies and now, that’s just how it works.” He made it sound like it was permanent and couldn’t be fixed.  Well, it can be fixed, and Dr. Fullerton fixed it.  It’s been a few days since seeing Dr. Fullerton, and my hip has clicked a couple of times with very slight movement, like shifting weight in bed.  Of course I worry that I’m doing something to make the hip out of socket, but perhaps it’s always been out of whack that and now for the first time it’s starting to behave properly.  I am also noticing some muscles surrounding my LEFT knee are spasming.  I’ve noticed that when I get one muscle treated, if it’s been affecting another muscle, that other muscle will start spasming as it releases.  So perhaps my right hip has been affecting my left knee. Pretty cool stuff.

Once I’m allowed back into resistance training, I’m planning on doing some pilates and yoga to work on these muscles.  I imagine with a healed hip the movements will be much easier to perform.  They say to help deal with injuries you need to work on core strength, but what happens when it’s your core that is injured? Anyways, I am looking forward to testing it out and will report back on how it handles.  I’m not posting a video about this because my vlog is more about my shoulder recovery than dealing with my hips.

In a couple of days I will see Dr. Fullerton yet again for him to treat my shoulder, so I'll report back with that.

Six weeks out from fifth prolotherapy treatment

So it’s been about two weeks of resistance training after my fifth prolotherapy treatment.  As I predicted, at the two week mark I started to get all of my old pains back. And, as I predicted, after that I started to get back to feeling better.  As of right now, there are days where I don’t even notice any pain in my back area, and there are some days where I feel the need to try to roll out some knots. 

I also think I’m starting to realize that the discomfort I’m feeling is stemming from the issues in the front of my shoulder.  I realize that most of the discomfort I’m feeling is from tight neck muscles in the front of my shoulder, like the scalene and the sternocleidomastoid. So for the next session I hope for him to check that out and make sure everything is fine.  I remember one session where he poked the front of my shoulder and it hurt a lot, and it made him go “Hmmm” but he didn’t do anything about it because he decided to address the damage to the back first.  Perhaps it is time for him to try that again and see what happens. Wouldn’t surprise me if there was something wrong with the front of my shoulder too. Sigh.

Did a little bit of the phase one stuff, and nothing felt… rusty. Every movement came pretty easily.  I still did real light weight and in slow, controlled movements.  After all of that I then did a little bit of Indian clubs.  I worked with the two pounders and  there was one motion that stretched my shoulder and it felt… significant. It kind of hurt, but it was the pain that I’ve associated with adhesions tearing, and not injury pain.  As soon as I stopped clubbing I felt fine.

It still doesn’t feel quite right in my left side when I try to pull down my shoulder blade, but perhaps that’s because it’s playing tug of war with my shoulder, it’s hard to tell.

I saw my PT that does dry needling, and he found a huge knot in my pec, probably from the trauma of the prp injection. 

I really haven’t been able to push myself with heavy weights yet because I was in an accident and right now my car is in a shop. I can’t get to a gym so I’ve been using the apartment’s fitness center but they don’t even have a barbell so I’m kind of stuck.  I’m hoping to get a temporary gym membership down the street but we will see.

I am able to do thinks like Dumbbell squats, and I have to say my core feels a lot more stable now on the left side.  I used to feel kind of… wobbly.  I also feel like I have more control over my shoulder blade, even if I keep finding myself with a forward-oriented shoulder.

…It’s been over a year now of seeing Dr. Fullerton, and I thought after a year I would just stop and give up.  But because I keep feeling better each time, I keep seeing improvement, I don’t want to stop.  Instead, I’m excited to see how much better I will feel after the next treatment. I’m sure I’m coming off a little strangely with this, but I’ve always been one to take care of things: My car, my chief knives, my butcher’s block, etc.  But the most basic thing to take care of is my body, and it seems that I didn't do a good job of that earlier in life.  Now that I'm a little wiser, I want to be pain free.  I want my body to work the way it was intended to work.