A Victory at Last... Physiotherapy really works.

Greetings,

Yes, you read it right, I have a victory at last. My regular readers would have read about the problems that I have been having with my knees being quite painful for quite some time. They would have also read about the awful threat and actual happening of me having to use my walking cane for a period of time. Well, I can finally report a victory on that front.

Some months ago, March by my accounting, I managed to get into see the Allied Health Department at the Mater Hospital in Brisbane for an assessment on my knees. After the assessment they decided that they would trial me on three months of physiotherapy to see if that would help before going to send me to see the orthopedic surgeon to see what surgical options there were. I liked this idea as the idea of them cutting open my knees was not my idea of fun as it involved weeks of being off my feet.

Off I went to the Physiotherapy Department. Horribly helpful people, obviously not well-informed about all of my conditions. Sure they got told about my fibromyalgia, but not about the hyper-mobility and the marfans syndrome. These can make some of the exercises a little interesting and also some of the stresses on joints a little interesting. Once these were dealt with things got started.

My physiotherapist Anne was great. Rather than going straight for the knees she started with my posture and looked at my feet. Seems my feet were rolling inward resulting in my knees doing a similar thing, more stress on them, so we started there. My feet have mostly been good aside from the occasional dislocated/bruised toe, forming bunions, long feet and long toe issues. First we did some exercises to convince my feet to start "standing up" and rolling out. This also did a bit of work on my ankles as well, not a bad thing. Some taping was involved which worked a treat.

Result, I now have orthotics in my regular walking shoes to keep my feet in the right place. This helped a bit with taking some pressure off my knees. Next bit, as a part of this was gaining some control over the muscles around my ankles and the joints themselves. Also stretches were involved of various muscle groups in the legs. Ask my fencing students, some of them are now being subjected to them.

With the feet and ankles on the mend the knees were next. This is where the real work started. Lots of exercises lots of repetition and lots of posture correction. If you are a fencer, and your teacher says "Get your knee turned out." Just do it. It will save you a lot of time and effort later on. So now I have a bunch of exercises to work on groups of muscles and also stretches to also keep them nice and limber. They were horribly tight previously, I never noticed how much.

The end result of all this is. When you go to the physiotherapist and they give you exercises to do. Do them. They do work. They will help. I was discharged from the Mater Physiotherapy Department today. Aside from the usual fibromyalgia annoyances which I have to put up with anyway my knees have never felt better. I will be keeping up with the exercises and stretches because I do not want them to go back to where they were.

Cheers,

Henry.
  

Probably a Winter Thing...

Greetings,

Sorry, it has been so long since I have posted. More to the point, sorry it has been so long since I have had any real inspirations about fibromyalgia (FM). This one just came to me as I was off to the chemist again today.

Now this is probably a winter thing, but I have noticed that every winter my medication for takes a jump up. I am not just talking pain-killers, be they short-term or regularly taken, I am talking the whole lot of them. Seems that the cold and the general changeable weather really gets to me, so every winter at the beginning, off I go to the doctor and we increase the level of medications to my "toleration" point.

I could feasibly take more, but that would impinge on my research and other activities which I like, so instead I take enough to take the edge off so I can function reasonably. This is a discussion the doctor and I had and have had many times. Yes, more medication would make me have less pain but I would have less control of my functions and that would annoy me, which would be worse than the pain in my books, so the negotiations continue.

The other thing that I have noticed, and this is one that I am very wary of, that is that the medications only increase, they never decrease. This means at some stage the body gets to used to them and thus requires more. In essence it means that certain drugs become less and less useful. We all need to be careful of this one. No one wants to get to a stage where nothing works, or the medications required to do anything are so extreme that they are excessively hard to get. Thus I only increase my medications when I have to. Of course being a stubborn sod, sometimes that hint needs to come from others.

Anyway, I suppose the point here is that we all should keep and eye on how much of what we are putting in and just how effective it really is. Like I said it is probably only because it is winter here in Australia and I am noticing it more, does not mean that it is less important.

Cheers,

Henry.