Category: Pain

Yesterday my physio gave me a 24 hour iontophoresis patch. Kind of a cool idea – it uses two patches, one with the drug, one with an electrolyte solution, and a metallic strip joining them. The idea seems to be to form an electrical circuit along the muscle and have the ions of the drug migrate through the muscle. I have no idea if it works. This morning that elbow feels worse than the other one, but it normally feels worse.

She also told me to stop doing that stretch that hurts so much.

I’m beginning to wonder if the quick diagnosis of tennis elbow was correct – the pain feels more like it’s in the joint than in the tendon.

I think icing last night helped, at least up until the part where the bag leaked and the ice water spilled all over the sheets.

More taking breaks and stretching. That one stretch still hurts – I think I’m going to cut it out. I’ve got physio again tonight, I’ll see if she can give me a better stretch.

Well, I took the physio’s advice about taking breaks and stretching more often. I can’t say whether it helped or not, but it probably didn’t hurt. I’m currently icing one elbow – I don’t have enough ice to do both.

In spite of her advice on how to modify it, one of the stretches still seems to hurt – not a nice pulling out the tension stretch type hurt, but a “damage the ligaments” type hurt. Bad hurt. I’ve got to figure out how to stretch “A” without hurting “B”.

In physio today, we did the very painful “massage” thing that she does. It hurts like hell when she’s doing it, and for a while afterwards. Then she did ultra sound, and a less painful type of massage. Then she did what she calls “stim”, which is an electrical thing that makes the surface muscles just under the skin twitch in an interesting and not all-together unpleasant manner. While that was going on, she also applied cold packs to both elbows.

Joanne, the physio, also recommended that I take a break and stretch every 20 minutes when I’m typing. That’s going to be tough. She also suggested I use ice when I get home from work.

It’s a couple of hours after the physio, and my elbows feel better than usual.

Since yesterday I proved that not doing my stretches didn’t stop the pain from increasing all day, I did (a slightly abbreviated version of) them today. Elbows still more painful in the afternoon than in the morning, but no worse than yesterday. One of the stretches hurts a particular part of the elbow that doesn’t hurt when I’m not doing them, so I’m going to ask my physio JoAnne if I’m doing it right.