Rants and Revelations

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.