By Juliana LeRoy
If anyone tells you that physical therapy is called PT because it really stands for Pain and Torture, they are not all the way wrong. It’s not a spa treatment, but the therapy is dealing with something that already hurts or you wouldn’t be there; so really, it’s not the therapy’s fault. The therapist sort of pushes you through the discomfort to bring you out the other side.
The reason I was in physical therapy was I had managed to injure my shoulder trying to be healthy, way back in May. I somehow “tweaked” my shoulder putting on — or possibly trying to take off — an exercise top. (It’s slightly fuzzy, because I recall a brief bit of time where I was stuck, halfway in and halfway out, my shoulder hurting like the dickens, freaking out that I was going to have to call someone to cut me out of the dadgum garment. I’m sure our firefighters would have had a field day with that call.)
As with most minor injuries, I figured I would wait it out, favoring it and letting it heal.
I waited and favored all the rest of May, and June, but it didn’t get better; I finally went to the doctor in early July and was referred to physical therapy. Due to the fun of waiting for the referral to call for an appointment, and then having to re-submit the referral to a therapist who was in network, I didn’t get in to see somebody until early August.
I anxiously presented myself at Back to Golf, and put myself in Jeff’s hands, resigned to my fate. It turns out that my “tweak” was a small tear in my rotator cuff. There was scar tissue where it had tried to heal up and my shoulder had sort of frozen because of it.
The first session Jeff sort of dug in where it hurt and explained we were breaking up the scar tissue. Then I got to lie down with ice and a little electric stimulator pulsing on that spot, and that was the whole session. I told Matt that I was surprised that I didn’t have to do anything else, and he gave a dry little chuckle: “Oh, you will.” (He has had physical therapy multiple times for multiple injuries.)
The next session began with the digging, and then I had little mini circuits of exercises (“rowing” with exercise bands, lifting my arms up in a “V,” holding a giant yoga ball while someone tried to wrestle it away, etc.), and then I got to relax with the ice and electro-stimming. The exercises were almost comically easy, especially to the very fit physical therapy assistants, but they were challenging for me.
I am not fit, or sporty, or able to isolate specific muscles; I am the person who was knocked out playing badminton in high school PE class, smacked in the head and knocked three rows up into the stands while attending a basketball game, and injured putting on an exercise bra, so here we are. If you were to measure my athletic ability, I would go into negative digits. I do not have a good sense of where my body is in space, or how to get it to move in specific ways.
The fit young people would say things like, “Bring your shoulder blades together and hold the position for five seconds,” and I would try to figure out how to carry out that instruction and count silently. (“Oh, shoot, are those my shoulder blades? Are they moving together? Oh, jeez, what number am I on? How many of these have I done?”)
The little pattern continued for my six sessions — dig around, try to follow exercises, then ice and electro-stim (and a little drifting half-nap, if I’m being honest). Each session became easier.
As the scar tissue released and the muscles around the injury became stronger, my mobility increased and the pain subsided. I was surprised at how quickly it all happened… and I regretted waiting so long to go in. I had more pain and torture before I got to see Jeff than from anything that happened while I was under his care.
