Sometimes I lie awake night after night coming apart at the seams

[kiya]

Sometimes that's more literal than others.

My skeleton is wrong. And by that I mean "more wrong than the usual parameters that are why I keep a cane around for emergencies and complain about my back".

For example: Half the time when I pick KJ up to put her on the diaper table, as I'm setting her down something goes out of alignment in my wrist with a horrifying sensation and sometimes pain. My right ankle has been on strike for the last few weeks, and sometimes the knee and hip join it in refusing to cross the picket lines. I had that awful rubber-band-spasm feeling in a wrist, too, which wound up with me putting it in an ineffectual brace for a couple of days. Back pain has congealed into a couple of immobile lumps up against my spine. On the up side, my shoulders don't appear to be any worse than usual, or perhaps it's just that my standards of comparison differ. While whispercricket was in the hospital I had several lengthy pontifications about the Hyperbole and a Half pain scale, which I have memorised the bottom half of. (Normal me is around 1-2 pretty constantly, I'm currently wandering between 3-5 reliably.)

Usually when I sleep I get a partial reset on things - I spend an hour or two after getting up with no more than a couple of minor sproings, which is within my scope of normal. And then I'll be doing something, and the ankle will go, on and off, getting worse over the course of the day, taking other things down with it; I'll change KJ and the wrist will spang unnervingly.... Basically, over the course of each day, it degenerates.

And over the course of each week, the curve also trends downwards.

There was a part of me that was sure this was a stress thing, from the moving and the disruption and the new baby and everything else, that it would get better when the stress did. And the stress is better, and I'm still getting worse. Which at least gets me to the emotional point of H&1/2 5 pretty reliably: Why is this happening to me??

I just had to haul KJ upstairs for a diaper change, and she wouldn't walk, so I had to pick her up, and I just had to ... stand there ... after I did so, to rebalance, and I got her up the stairs and half-collapsed at the top. She happily ran down to her room and flung herself on her bed as I got the stuff together for the diaper change, but whispercricket got teinedreugan to come upstairs because I couldn't pick the kid up to put her on the diaper table.

I'm actually kind of scared about this.

Comments

[jenett]

This is exactly the kind of stuff that the Feldenkrais work did wonders for me with.

(To the point that I think I've had one week of body being cranky in the old ways since I moved, even though I'm no longer doing regular lessons.)

A lot of what I learned was how to be more conscious of what's happening when stuff seizes, or goes sproing, and what to do about it that makes it better, not worse.

Also, toddlers make lots of existing imbalances worse (because they get to be a pretty substantial weight, and are not good about helping you carry them easily a lot of the time). There are, apparently ways to adapt for this: figuring that out was not part of my Feldenkrais work, but I know there are options for it.

I did a post this spring about it with extensive explanation (and it is a public post) is at http://jenett.dreamwidth.org/1373909.html if that's helpful to you or anyone reading. I think there's parts of the geekiness of it that you'd really like, though there are certainly other body-mechanics modalities that also work for people.

(It looks like there's a couple of options within about 30 minutes of you: one of the things that's awesome about Feldenkrais is that you can often get pretty substantial results within 3-6 sessions. I kept with it for a year for other reasons, but I'd say 90% of the physical stuff was 80+% better by my 6th lesson.

http://www.feldenkrais.com has lots more info and a practitioner search. There are also audio lessons you can do on your own - I can let you know some good places to start if you'd prefer to try that. (I found the practitioner one on one sessions *tremendously* more helpful, but they are less convenient.))

If that's not a route you want to go, I understand the magical word for physical therapy referrals is physiatrist - they look a lot more at the whole movement of the body rather than specific joint movement/response. See also: people who finally took Elise seriously when she said "I have to learn how to walk again, not just rehab."

[kiya]

That sort of thing would I think be far more useful once I get my shit together and get my damn license, though the small person wrangling issues are not thereby solved. I did find the Feldenkrais stuff you talked about really interesting, and have dithered about it since.

"Physiatrist" is a useful word, thank you. I am also going to be getting a session with whispercricket's chiropractor....

[jenett]

I found chiro work good as a stop-gap. It didn't fix the stuff that for me kept pushing out of alignment, but it did help me stay functional until I finally got around to doing something longer term.

(In terms of the Feldenkrais: looking at the locations, yeah, you'd need license. But a number of them do teach at times that might work with someone else child-wrangling)

[queenofhalves]

i've gotten helpful wrist adjustments from a chiropractor too. a good one may be able to suggest appropriate strength training as well.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Feldenkrais hasn't worked too well for me yet,[*] but I'm glad you brought it up, because in principle it sounds like it could be useful to me, and so I immediately thought of it for lilairen.

[*] The way I think about it is, I'd need a lot more sessions and a lot more home practice to learn to better listen to me body. So for now, it is too advanced for me. So while I would love to fix the underlying causes, for now I think I would rather work on improving the symptoms.

[jenett]

Are you doing ATM (classes) or one on one (FI)? I did FI sessions, and I think I would have gotten stuff out of the ATM classes, but not nearly as much as I did with FI (or as fast.)

(I'm now living 2 hours from anyone doing anything Feldenkrais related, though I ought to find out if any of them do weekend afternoon workshop type things)

The thing I found about FI is that it's really a conversation within the body, but in response to outside stimulus. I got useful stuff out of it before that clicked and made sense, but I got a lot more out of it after I figured out how to listen to and deliberately react to that conversation. If that makes any sense. (And in contrast, the ATM sessions I've done from audio files, I have to work really hard to get my head out of the way of my responses, which sort of defeats some of the purpose for me.)

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

One on one.

[zeborah]

Ow, ow. I hope it's something that can be fixed/managed easily. :-(

[leanne-opaskar.livejournal.com]

What Jen said. It sounds more complicated than what I have been doing (PT for shoulder and IT band). I would still talk with your doctor if you haven't, but I assume you have. I do encourage you to try some form of PT -- it has been working wonders for me so far. I have more motion in my left shoulder than I've had in years.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Does professional massage help at all?

[kiya]

I last had a professional massage when I was pregnant, and it was great for two days and then everything got worse, apparently because getting things relaxed enabled them to seize up in even more horrifying ways. It has been a goodly while, though.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

I wonder if that has to do with the pregnancy itself? I mean, I'd assume that Creating A Smaller Human does a number on your body anyway. . . it seems like it'd probably be hard work.

I assume you know chaiya/Crystal Huff, right?

[kiya]

Given how terrible I am with names I doubt I would know if I did know.

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Her userpics are here:
http://www.livejournal.com/allpics.bml?user=chaiya

You can look through those and see if she looks familiar. She was the person who started the Massage Den at Arisia, and she's an excellent massage therapist. She also was conchair of Arisia a year or two back. And she's just a generally lovely person.

I trust her judgement on people's bodies, and I recommend her as a therapist. She's skilled and smart, and, besides, she needs the money. I encourage you to contact her, because I bet she would help, and, if you're not already friends, you ought to be, anyway. Because you're both cool in compatible ways.

[alexmegami]

If the massage therapist did too much release, yeah, the hormones already running through your body during pregnancy making things relax + further relaxation could make your muscles rebound into really bad spasms just to keep things *together* (and sounds like they did).

[dubiousprospects.blogspot.com (from livejournal.com)]

Couple-six things --

You've had an actual medical professional examine you for connective tissue issues? That really ought to be step one. (Chiropractors, massage therapists, etc. don't count for saying "no" about this; if they make troubled "hmmm" noises it might be well to heed them, though.)

Almost everyone of the pale-pink persuasion is short of vitamin D. It's almost impossible to take too much vitamin D, and it's super-important for things like connective tissue, bones, and muscle fibers. Try taking a thousand units a day for six months and see if it helps. (It will help with something; maybe not this, specifically, but something.)

Once something starts hurting, it's very easy to start getting out of balance with yourself to try to minimize the ow, which paradoxically tends to make the ow last. Anything you can do with posture, stretching, and/or being coached to get back into a dynamic balance will probably help. (Qi Gong "regulation of the breath" and "large regulation of the breath" sorts of things.)

Strength. Anything generally strengthening, especially symmetrically strengthening, almost has to help. I don't know what you can do for this, but there almost has to be something. Even gentle isometrics will help. (and they go with the conscious-dynamic-symmetry thing, too.)

Diet -- are you sure nothing in your diet is disagreeing with you? Age related food issues can be both sneaky and debilitating. Slowly becoming unable to properly digest milk, for example, can produce aches and pains.

It's really easy to get into the habit of trying to reach into immaterial spaces; reaching into the computer through the pointing device is a common example. This often leads to way too much stress concentration along the asymmetric stress from the slow contortion of trying to reach into some place that isn't there.

I do hope everything improves readily!

-- Graydon, who apparently can't do OpenId just now.

[kiya]

Hilariously, one of KJ's recent habits is to find the Vitamin D drops, demand that I take some, and demand that I give some to her.

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

My spine is pretty substantially stuffed, and has been since adolescence (a 45-degree double scoliosis). Since what you describe here looks pretty familiar to me, I'll share my observations and coping strategies, in case any of it seems helpful to you.

First up, due to the inherent assymetry of my spine and associated musculature, stuff will occasionally go sproing or pop or ouch without any specific input or action on my part. Sometimes I can pin down something specific that sets it off (which is helpful because then I can minimise/avoid that thing to help it settle down again); but sometimes there's nothing obvious that causes the glitch, in which case I try to avoid spending too many mental cycles trying to figure out why, and instead concentrate on what to do to fix/help it.

There's a couple of elements that my self-care routine depend on. Firstly, having a good masseur/bonecruncher to help put my back together again when it gets irredeemably screwed up and I'm in too much pain to be able to function well.

And secondly, there's the longer-term strategy of trying to maintain decent muscle tone in the areas that are most supportive of my back, which in my case turns out to be my abdominal muscles. I find that if I can manage to do a set of 100 crunches on at least three or four days in a given week, and can sustain this pattern over a period of weeks/months, then I'll be feeling a lot better. Ideally the plan is to do this All The Time, but it never works out that way - I do the regular crunches for a while, I start feeling pretty good, then slack off. And after a while my back will start hurting again, which motivates me to get back into the 100-crunches-a-day thing again. (Pain's a great motivator!) No matter how screwed up my back is when I start getting back into the crunches routine, after around 2 weeks or so I'll be in a lot less pain, and if I can keep it up, I'll find my back feeling really good after a month or two of it.

I second Graydon's suggestion about getting checked over by a medical sort - both to check out the connective tissue thing, and also to check out your spine. (Have you ever been checked for scoliosis? It's a trivially easy thing to check for, and if you haven't then I suggest you do so asap.)

I've been in a position where I've been in tears and despair because I couldn't see a way to a pain-free future. I know how scary that can feel. But it does get better. I'm not pain-free these days, but because I've figured out a way to manage my spine issues and have some level of control over it, I generally feel pretty ok about it all.

If you want to know anything more about what I do, what helps and what doesn't, please feel free to ask (either here or by email). I've had to deal with stuff like this for a long time, and I've got a lot of coping stuff I've developed or learned that really does help with much of it.

*hug*

[kiya]

I have mild scoliosis, diagnosed some twenty-five years ago. Which I strongly suspect is related to a lot of my issues and the fact that apparently one of my shoulders is an inch wider than the other (WTF).

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

Yup, that right there is your problem.

Consider a spine from a biomechanical perspective. A normal, laterally-straight spine is designed so that it does its loadbearing spread down through the whole thing. But if the spine is laterally curved (i.e. scoliosis), when one applies load downward there's a kind of concertina-type effect which winds up placing most of the load in a few specific spots according to the location of the curve. Not good, right? That's why you probably get more pain when you've been carrying heavy objects around, and why your back tires more easily than most. Also, muscles that are intended to support a straight, vertical structure are being pulled around in odd positions due to the scoliosis. Your ribcage is almost certainly slightly rotated around the vertical axis, your shoulders and hips are a little assymetrical, etc etc etc.

The bottom line is that what *should* be a strong loadbearing structure really isn't. And that's why you're getting muscles knotting and twanging, and lots of back pain.

The best thing I know how to help this is the ab-strengthening stuff I suggested in the earlier post. Get your abs strong enough that they can support more of the load. It'll help hugely, and doesn't have to be huge time investment. (My 100-crunches-a-day routine takes maybe 7 minutes to do.)

Also, insofar as it is possible for you, avoid lifting heavy loads as much as you can. Can some lifting tasks be delegated to other household members? Are there tools that you could use to aid you when you have to lift stuff? I find that even in times when I've been good with my excercises and my back's in a (relatively) good state, heaving piles of books or heavy boxes around will do me in. So I try to avoid doing so as much as possible. For example, we've split the household grocery shopping into two stages (light stuff and heavy stuff) and I delegate the heavy shopping to a partner. It's well known among folk I interact with that I'm not up for heavy lifting, so if a friend's moving house I pack boxes rather than lift them. And so on.

There's always going to be lifting tasks that you can't delegate; but I find that I have a set number of "lifting points" to spend in a given period, and if I save them for stuff I really can't avoid, I'm in a lot less pain overall than if I ignore the issue and just lift stuff willy-nilly. :-)

I hope some of this rambling is useful to you, and that some of my experiences turn out to be relevant to your situation. Once again, please feel free to bend my ear if you want to discuss this further - I've been dealing with this sort of stuff for many years now, and it can be good to know that you're not alone with this.

[kiya]

I am attepting to implement the crunches thing, though I only managed thirty last night. Thank you.

[submarine-bells.livejournal.com]

Good luck! Fingers crossed that it helps make things easier for you.

[heleninwales.livejournal.com]

Just wanted to second Graydon's suggestions, also to send sympathetic thoughts. I hurt my back hauling toddlers around. It's so easily done. :(

Basically, it's the muscles that support joints, so any form of gentle strengthening and balancing exercises should help. (Though if you really are in pain (rather than just an occasional, 'Ouch!'), a visit to the doctor would be a good thing before starting.)

Yoga helped me a lot with back pain as well as general strength and suppleness, also Tai Chi is excellent and I expect Pilates is good too, though I've never tried it personally.

[luellon.livejournal.com]

*hugs*

I hope you find good treatment and get better soon.

[beloitst.livejournal.com]

I echo what has been said about seeing a medical doctor in addition to whatever other courses of actions you pursue. Find a really good primary care physician who will be actively interested in helping you find the correct diagnosis.

Without a diagnosis, it's hard to know what to treat, whether that treatment is conventional western medicine, other types of medicine, therapies, magic/energy work, etc.

[ivy]

Do you have general joint hypermobility? (Apologies if I should know this... I feel as if I should, and I am totally goldfishing it. "Oh look, a castle!")

[kiya]

My midwife described some of my issues as "loose hips" (my hips pop in and out of proper alignment all the damn time, including last night when I was doing crunches), but I'm not, for example, doublejointed or anything. A lot of this comes down to - as submarine_bells noted - scoliosis and its consequences, with a sidebar of "what happens when one does something nasty to one ankle that won't heal and one has to compensate for everything else" and "stress makes everything twice as fun!"

[ardaniel]

If you're rocking chronic joint pain and "loose" joints, it might be benign joint hypermobility syndrome. You will likely require the aid of a rheumatologist to get it properly diagnosed and to exclude other possible causes.

I am a nerd and not a doc. Your mileage may vary.