As I've gotten older, I've become an increasingly delicate flower and let me tell you, it's a drag.
My latest physical complaint is that I have a repetitive stress injury in my right shoulder, presumably from using my right shoulder repetitively, and it BLOWS.
I've had it for so long now that I actually taught myself to use my computer mouse with my left hand and now at least once a quarter, Katr has to listen to my story about my grandfather and how he was ambidextrous and how clearly I have inherited his gift but only for mousing and using a knife at the dinner table.
I saw a physiotherapist years ago in Toronto, when the issue was more about my neck, and he gave me some helpful exercises to do, which I still occasionally do and my neck is still good. But the shoulder has flared up on and off for years. Generally, if I stretch regularly and don't spend too much time playing games on my devices, I could still write and work and knit and do yoga fatly, so I thought it was okay.
This summer, though, I somehow crossed into a shoulder danger zone that I didn't even know existed and one morning I woke up and was just super fucked. I couldn't raise my right arm above the shoulder. It was like someone had slid a hot knife in there and then left it. And I fuckin' couldn't take an ibuprofen because my stomach is still super special. Naturally, I used my left arm a lot more, to compensate and then THAT shoulder started to betray me too and I felt like I was in that episode of The Tick where some villain removes everyone's arms and it's very hard to accomplish things.
As The Tick says at the end of that episode, "When evil is afoot and you don't have any arms, you've gotta use your head." So I did a lot of gentle stretching and minimal typing and hot packs and after a few days, my basic shoulder functions returned.
"Dang," I thought, "I should probably find a physiotherapist so that I learn some strategies to avoid this happening again!"
And then I waited for four months until things got rilly bad again and today I finally went to see a physiotherapist.
I picked the physiotherapist practice based on two main criteria: I could walk there and they had consistently good reviews on Google. I hadn't seen a lot of pictures of the place, though, and when I got there, I was a little taken aback. The office is just one big room. There was a little reception area. There was a little exercise area where an elderly lady was being coached through some squats. And then there were "treatment rooms", which were just very small curtained off areas with a chair and a massage table in them, like you were going to get a massage in the emergency room.
The receptionist led me into a "treatment room" and handed me a gown. As I sat there, in my sassy open-backed gown, listening to an elderly gentleman moan through his ultrasound treatment through the curtain about a foot away from me, I felt the lack of privacy might be too much for spoiled Roro. My last physiotherapist had a whole office to himself, with doors on it and everything. "Oh shit," I thought, starting to panic, "AM I TOO BOURGEOIS FOR THIS PHYSIOTHERAPIST'S OFFICE?"
And then Gina walked in and everything became okay.
Gina didn't mess around. I told her what the deal was. She poked my shoulder and said "Whoa. Okay. Let's start with...THE MACHINES." I kinda thought we'd chat and come up with a plan but fuck that shit. Gina IMMEDIATELY had a whole series of things happening and I forgot that I was 12 inches away from touching Mr. Morello as I got ultrasounded and lasered and hot packed and vibrated and massaged and instructed in some exercises with an elastic band. It was serious business.
As I was leaving, exhausted and with the back of my head greasy with mineral oil because I didn't think to bring a hair tie, Gina printed out the exercises for me and showed me the one on the last page:
"See how, in the picture, this lady is standing on the band and putting her arms up in a V? Not you. You're going to hold the band and shrug your shoulders up and down."
She looked at me sternly and said: "You're not ready for the V."
She demonstrated the shrugging again, "We call this 'I', okay, so you're going to do 'I,I,I' - it's allll about you."
Apparently I'm not ready for the V, you guys. But Gina said maybe next week.
