So, um, yeah. Close to two years ago, I pulled a muscle in my inner thigh. Nothing too odd in that. I’ve done that many a time. I even expected that this one would take longer than usual to heal because back when I used to be a ballet dancer (many moons ago, let me tell you… especially in dancer years) I’d felt a similar explosion of white-hot pain when I tore a muscle in my calf. That had taken months to heal, so I settled in for the long haul.
I waited, stretched ever so carefully, waited, tried heat, waited, tried ice, waited, settled on careful stretching again, waited some more… nothing. Six months later I still couldn’t sit on the floor and move my leg more than about 10 degrees to the side of center. 10 degrees! But as long as I didn’t stretch that leg out to the side (and really, how often do you get the urge to stretch your leg to the side in a day) I felt no discomfort.
Fast forward to this spring. By this time I was kind of embarrassed to ask anyone about this becuase I knew all they’d do is scold me for not coming in earlier and then tell me that I’d irreparably damaged something. (If that last bit doesn’t sound entirely rational, just remember that I have a rather irrational fear of doctors and everything will make a little more sense.) But when I had my yearly physical, I mentioned to my doctor that this had been going on and she referred me to physical therapy (without any scolding).
This brings us all the way to today when the physical therapist spent over an hour trying to figure out what was wrong with my leg. I tell you, it takes some muscle to be a physical therapist! She stretched me and pulled on me and had me pull on her and stretched me some more, and determined that I had “full range of motion.” I almost laughed. How could that be? Thoughout the session I’d been frustrated by how stiff I was, but apparently she’d gone through the whole thing thinking I was flexible. She finally believed me when she measured the angles of stretch in the uninjured leg.
75 degrees to the side in the left leg (my historically less flexible leg, and the one I blew out when I was 12)… 40 degrees in my right leg. That’s when she ordered ultrasound therapy.