A New Theory

Twice this week medical professionals have questioned my accepted narrative about my back injury, which we've always thought, and doctors have concurred, was primarily a herniated disc, L5-SI1.  But on Tuesday, the pain doctor said that the herniated disc was resolved and the pain was a secondary injury in my coccyx, though he doesn't know how the two are related.  Last night, my new physical therapist said she even wondered if the second incident, in April, when I ceased entirely being able to sit, wasn't a disc herniating that I felt, but my SI joint popping out somehow.  I know they've done studies where something like 20% of a random sample of people have herniated discs but are asymptomatic, i.e. without back pain.  Is it possible that the pain wasn't originally or always the disc?  Hard to say now, but apparently it isn't my current trouble.  And, I must say, that is quite a paradigm shift for me.  Just thinking about another kind of injury, though it's 9 months past, gives me the heebie-jeebies.  I mean, who wants to think of their pelvis getting out of joint?  I had gotten comfortable, so to speak, with having a herniated disc, even if it didn't always make sense experientially.  Now I have something else to wrap my mind around.

But I'm trying not to think on it too much, since it doesn't actually change what I'm going through.  In fact, the notion that it is something else gives us a new path to follow after 18 or so months chasing the disc.  And this new physical therapist has some ideas how to help.  And all without the painful internal tailbone manipulation of the last therapist (whom she used to work with)!  Anyway, she practices, if I have this right, Integrative Manipulative Therapy, with techniques derived from the French osteopath Jean-Pierre Barral.  Plus a sprinkling of cranio-sacral, energy healing, biofeedback, and chakra work.  I know, it sounds like magic.  But, she watched me walk with pain in my c-section scar and tightness in my back, laid me down, popped my sacrum painlessly, and had me walk again . . . with none of the symptoms of a few minutes earlier (though, she said for awhile it would pop back . . and that's just the beginning of the work to get me to sit, but she thinks I will be able to).  I told her that 400 years ago, they would have burned her at the stake!  It was amazing.  Then she did some soft tissue, visceral work (something about fascial envelopes connecting parts of our bodies) that was so gentle but released energies, she said, that clearly made my legs shake.  She even touched my head and tailbone alternately and said I had no spinal blockages and that she wouldn't have known I had a herniated disc.  All I have to say is that if it works, I'm a believer.

Which might take me further along in my project to understand the idea of  prayer and  spiritual energies, for sure.