What happened? Are you dead inside, like the chef in Tortilla Soup?
Decided to do a gravity check from the top of an 8-ft ladder. The grass was forgiving to my back, the asphalt not so much to the cranium. Fractured the skull and evidently broke some wiring. No other dain bramage that I'm aware of.
And yes, my taste is defintely diminished as a result.
Had my ART appointment. Didn't really do much ART -- we spent an hour looking at how jacked up I am, and then doing rehab/mobility work to confirm it. Not good. This is going to get expensive.
Full report coming tonight.
__________________ Megaloi -- My Blog
"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."
- Mignon McLaughlin
Wow. I had no idea. Is this a recent thing? So you're more brain damaged than when we met?
Happened about 15 yrs ago, so I was already damaged goods when we met. I'd like to think my mental capacities haven't decayed much over the last two years, but somehow.....
Hold on, lost my train of thought. Give me a minute.
Had my ART appointment. Didn't really do much ART -- we spent an hour looking at how jacked up I am, and then doing rehab/mobility work to confirm it. Not good. This is going to get expensive.
Full report coming tonight.
Oh no.... So sorry to hear. Let us know the update when you get it.
1) Bunions -- I always thought these were visible and ugly bumps on the feet, and were the result of wearing pointy-toe shoes. Apparently not. It's a bone problem, and one effect is that the big toes start pointing inward toward the other toes on the same foot. Mine already do this pretty badly compared to most patients. Really badly compared to other 31yo patients.
2) Pronation -- I knew I'd been pronating pretty badly on the right foot (the leg that's been causing me so much trouble). But not this badly. He had me do a single-leg squat in front of a mirror, and when I loaded the leg it got really ugly. My big toe shot sideways, my knee collapsed inward and my hip thrust out sideways. Everything in the kinetic chain was having a freakout, and the leg was just shaking. Total breakdown. Eventually I fell over sideways.
3) Gait analysis -- due to my foot breaking down and a possible leg-length differential (X-ray being done on Monday) my gait is very inefficient and even harmful. Most people's weight flows from the heel to the toes as they walk. I have no flow. Heel/pad. Boom/boom. My arch never touches the ground, even though I have flat feet. This means that my feet aren't transferring kinetic energy forward very well, so a lot of energy gets tranferred upward. Into the leg. Hence the pain.
4) Hip/glute neuromuscular issues -- I already knew the glute/hip had some problems, since my self-done soft tissue work has been quite painful lately. They took me through the following exercises, which I am supposed to keep doing a few mornings per week to get things firing correctly:
a. Birddogs -- I nailed these
b. Clams, feet together and spread knees (band around thighs) -- I sucked like no man has sucked before on these. Extremely weak and painful.
c. Clams, knees together and spread feet -- not bad. I used ankle weights and it was still pretty easy.
d. Bridges -- I told the PT I could rock these and she didn't believe me. I said I could do them one-legged and she said no way, she only had a few athletes who could manage that. I did a set of 10 with both legs together (feet on upside-down bosu ball), 10 on one leg then 10 on the other. Booyah. This means my hamstrings are strong.
e. Dead bugs on foam roll -- I sucked again like no man has sucked before. I would consciously tell the left foot to lift off the ground, but it wouldn't. The right leg just didn't know how to stabilize my body.
Had lots of great discussions with the doc and PT about baseball, steroids, training and other similar topics. Looks like I'll be able to talk to them some more soon.
Next steps
Monday -- X-ray to measure for possible bone length discrepancy in legs
Tuesday -- ART and rehab/mobility work
Thursday -- ART and rehab/mobility work
Orthotics probably on tap soon. That's what will be expensive (up to $300 per pair)
This is obviously a big blow to my short-term challenge progress. Good things we're on a 6-month timeframe.
__________________ Megaloi -- My Blog
"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."
- Mignon McLaughlin
at least your upper body will get the attention it deserves
__________________ my training log
"Have fun and be determined to finish"-- Jack "UpNorth", 9.
"You see yourself every day. Nothing changes. Change comes in an explosion of awareness. You wake up one day and it dawns on you that it's not a sleep line but a wrinkle." - Deserve (aka Gabe)
Better to fix the problem now rather than later, and with the exception of the bunions, your problems seem fairly easy to correct. Well, except if your legs are different lengths, then you're screwed.
Hang in there Red. You'll walking like Barry, Robin and Maurice soon enough.
Thanks guys -- this definitely could have been a lot more serious. Now that I think about it, for the past 10 years my body has had an amazingly effective self-limiting mechanism that shut me down every time I really started lifting heavy loads with the lower body (DL, squat, etc...).
It's good that I haven't totally destroyed myself by now. It's also a very weird feeling to go to the doc complaining of all this knee trouble and 10 minutes later they tell you to basically shut up about the knee. The problems are in the foot and the hip, and the knee is just stuck in the crossfire. Fix the foot and hip, and it fixes the whole chain.
You'd think I would've learned five years ago when I had rotator cuff pain and they worked on my suprasprinatus and teres minor to fix it.
__________________ Megaloi -- My Blog
"Every society honors its live conformists and its dead troublemakers."
- Mignon McLaughlin
"If you do not find time to become and remain healthy, you will be obliged to find time to be ill." --George Hackenschmidt
"These Canadians lure you with their kindness and Eskimo stories and then WHAM...you're bent over an IHOP trash can, pants around your knees with nothing but your tears and the smell of blueberry syrup to comfort you." --gobbla
