The everyday blog of Richard Bartle.
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3:30pm on Friday, 16th January, 2009:
Anecdote
I went to the physiotherapist yesterday to have my bad shoulder looked at.
It's 5 weeks since I last went, most of which has been wasted effort. Towards the end of the last session, the physiotherapist changed her mind about what I had, saying it wasn't a muscle impingement but a genuine frozen shoulder. She gave me some exercises to help stretch the shoulder capsule.
Unfortunately, I was not able to do the exercises. They involved things like walking my arm up a wall until it's as high up as is comfortable, then holding it for 15 seconds. I couldn't hold it more than 3 seconds before I had to stop. It went from comfortable to painful that quickly. This meant that 4 of the 6 sets of exercises I'd been told to do were useless, so I was treading water the whole time, just doing the 2 that were OK — the one where I lie on my front and raise my shoulders, plus the one with the stick. Actually, the one with the stick wasn't any good, either, as I had been given the impression that I had to keep my arm in a particular orientation, but I didn't. As a consequence, I was helping the wrong muscles.
Anyway, yesterday I was able to persuade the physiotherapist that her initial diagnosis was correct. She was pretty well able to see it anyway, given that my left shoulder's muscles were visibly in the wrong places. I now have 4 exercises to do: the raise-the-shoulders one, the lift-arm-with-a-stick one, another lift-arm-with-a-stick one, and one she gave me the first time I saw her that she told me not to do last time as I wasn't doing it to her satisfaction. This involves lying face down on the bed, my left arm at right angles to the body but bent at the elbow such that it dangles over the bed. I hold something in the hand, and slowly move the arm forwards and backwards. It's really helping my ability to withstand pain, but I won't know what it's doing for the shoulder for another couple of weeks.
All this from playing too many computer games...
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Copyright © 2009 Richard Bartle (richard@mud.co.uk).