Interjections show
excitement. Or emotion. They’re generally set apart from a sentence…
by an exclamation point. Or by a comma
when the feeling’s not as strong.
Thank you School House Rock, for teaching me all I needed to
know about grammar, math and government systems!
That was last Friday. Only the interjection didn’t come
until about six hours after the injection.
My right hip hasn’t been happy since that last 11-mile run
and, as I mentioned in an earlier post, the end result was a recurrence of the
dreaded IT Band Syndrome in the leg formerly known as the Good Leg (not to be
confused with Angelina Jolie’s Leg. The
Good Leg does not have its own Twitter account.
Yet.) After foam rolling,
stretching, etc., I didn’t have any further sign of ITBS… but my hip was struck
by a burning pain every time I ran. Off
I went to my doc, who proclaimed it to be bursitis and gave me a shot of
cortisone to reduce the inflammation in time for the Tower of Terror 10-Miler.
Getting the shot wasn’t painful, just icky. ~shudder~
I have a thing about feeling things go through body tissue. ~shudder~
It doesn’t make me feel queasy, just eeeewwwwww. ~shudder~ But still – no real pain. Just a little discomfort. So I cruised on back to my job, where I
parked my fanny in a chair and proceeded to work six hours in a seated
position, secretly fantasizing about my return to running in a few days, better
than ever thanks to better living through pharmaceuticals.
And then… I stood up.
Or I tried to, anyway.
I actually looked down at my hip to see if a hot poker might
be sticking out of it.
By the time I’d driven home, I was in tears. A quick Google search indicated I was in the
throes of something called cortisone flare, a fairly common reaction to the
jabbing of cortisone into the body.
Rest, ice and an anti-inflammatory was the course of action. So I chased two Aleves with two glasses of
wine, parked myself on the couch with an ice pack, and didn’t leave for 36
hours. When I had to get up to use the bathroom, or feed Leo, it was with a whole
lot of wincing, whimpering, limping and grimacing.
As instructed, I waited five days to try running again. By then, the pain had vanished. An overcast evening following several days of
rain, it was cool(er), cloudy and perfect for a return to running. Doing slow intervals of 30 seconds running
followed by a minute walking, I was okay for about two miles. No pain, though everything felt “off”, as if
my hips and lower back weren’t quite in the right place and my gait felt all
sorts of wonky. And then, after two
miles, my hip started hurting again.
So, Thursday morning, I saw Dr. Miracle, my chiropractor. I pointed to where it hurt – at the very top
of my hip flexor in front, and the very top of my gluteus medias in back – and told
her that it felt “off” somewhere in between.
Dr. Miracle bent me like a pretzel, pushed, and SNAP-CRACKLE-POP,
whatever it was slid back into place and I instantly felt better! She did some Active Release Therapy on the
spots I’d pointed to, finished with some electro stim, and sent me on my way.
Sitting at my desk the rest of the day felt better than it
had in weeks. Driving my car, I felt no
pain while pressing on the pedals. So I
decided to give it a real test and fired up Ol’ Bessie, my treadmill. One mile, walking at a fast clip, with a few
runs thrown in…
It felt sooo much better!
No pain, no mechanical weirdness, back to normal. I followed that mile with a half hour of
gentle yoga and went to bed early to give my body extra time to heal and
recover.
The big question is, of course: can I make it another NINE
miles? I don’t know. And I won’t
know until a week from tomorrow, when I try. I’m hoping
it’ll be a lot more of this:
And not so much this:
