Tuesday, December 29, 2009

Graston fun and continued frustration....

I’ve been going to see a chiropractor/sports med/graston guy for 3 weeks now. The latest fun is he has me stand on my toes on a step while he scrapes down my arch, the tendons on the sides of my ankles, and parts of my calf with a stainless steel tool. This is fairly painful, and leaves my lower leg a bit green/purplish in color. I’m actually seeing 2 different guys at the same clinic bc I can’t always get into one or the other. One is nice, the other is not so nice, and I’m reaching a frustration point with both of them as to when I will be cleared to run again. And by run, I don’t mean jogging 100 m on a track. I mentioned to the nice one last night, that I’m at a breaking point, and without some more insight into what they see as my progression back to running, I’m going to jump ship and just go it alone. I could run pain free on roads/tracks before I got put in the damn boot, so this slow progression back into something that causes no pain doesn’t make a lot of sense to me. His response was that the partial tears could lead to complete tears which would be a career ending injury and that I can’t rush it, blah blah blah. It might as well be a career ending injury at the pace they want me to get back to running. At this rate I’ll be back to a 100 miler when I’m 70. Wasn’t the 6 weeks in the boot supposed to give the tendons time to heal?


I did jog 2 miles slowly on the treadmill last week, which I later got reprimanded for doing, by the grumpy one. He gives very unclear instructions and won’t repeat anything. So when he said I could go onto a track and run the straights for 2 miles, I took it as meaning he didn’t want me to run the curves bc of the increased strain on my tendon while turning. And at some point he mentioned the word ‘treadmill’ so I took it to mean I could try out a short run on the treadmill. I don’t know where to find a track, and no google search has given me any clue as to where I might find one that is not a pain in the ass to get to. So, I opted for the option that was easy, and ran an easy 20 minutes on the treadmill. It wasn’t fun (bc running slowly on a treadmill in a crowded gym never is), and didn’t cause any pain, but got a grumpy reaction from the doctor and I saw him write in his notes, “patient did not follow doctor’s instructions.” It’s to the point, where I’m about to give up on them, and just jump back into it. I’m not training to get back to a 5k, and their conservative approach with no insight into their ‘plan’ for me is not helping. 


I’ve got a new year’s eve appointment with the grumpy one…I’ll give them another week to convince me that this is going somewhere, and then Miwok training starts in earnest.

6 comments:

Caren said...

"patient did not follow instructions..." Ha! I love it, it's like that Seinfeld episode where Elaine kept getting reported by doctors for not being compliant. Maybe having all this information nowadays is not necessarily a good thing. If it doesn't hurt, and you didn't know it was a partial tear, you'd be running on it and you might be fine. I don't know; if it were me and it didn't hurt, I'd just run on it and listen very carefully to my body. It sounds very frustrating. Sorry you're not getting very much encouragement!

Dan Rose said...

You did your boot time, those tendons have to be healed up after 6 weeks. Those Graston guys just want to keep charging you $$. F 'em both. If you slowly ramp up the miles over the next few weeks you should be fine. My tibialis tear was good to go after I finally took 6 weeks off myself. From there I ran weeks of 20, 30, 40, 50, 60 miles. Nice and slow. After that I was back to 100%. I think you're closer to the finish of this rehab than you think.

ultrarunner (Brian Philpot) said...

Ya that sucks.I don't see a doctor unless i'm really bad, and then I still go with my body! What ever you do, make it a slow work up. Listen to u'r body, and be Carefull!

Gresham Chiropractor said...

the word "Safe" is indeed eye catching.. If there is no harm in trying, might as well take it..

south calgary chiropractor said...

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JuanitaVaughn said...

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