Octane Fitness Q35c Cross Trainer: Fitness Town: Your Fitness Equipment Experts

Octane Fitness Q35c Cross Trainer: Fitness Town: Your Fitness Equipment Experts.

This is the type of elliptical trainer I bought. The doctors suggested that elliptical exercise was good in that there isn’t a lot of jarring as you exercise.

The thing that you need to watch out for is that you do not twist the torso and that you engage your core as you do the exercise. At first you can grip the stationary handlebars and as you get stronger you can try letting go of the handlebars and swing the arms naturally ie don’t think too much about the arms.

La Pena de Bernal

 

Located in the municipality of Ezequiel Montes in the state of Queretaro, Mexico. This is the 4th largest monolith in the world at over 8200 feet high. It is approximately a 1 1/2 hour drive on excellent roads/highways from San Miguel de Allende.

2010 in review

The stats helper monkeys at WordPress.com mulled over how this blog did in 2010, and here’s a high level summary of its overall blog health:

The Blog-Health-o-Meter™ reads This blog is doing awesome!.

Crunchy numbers

A helper monkey made this abstract painting, inspired by your stats.

The average container ship can carry about 4,500 containers. This blog was viewed about 14,000 times in 2010. If each view were a shipping container, your blog would have filled about 3 fully loaded ships.

In 2010, there was 1 new post, growing the total archive of this blog to 222 posts.

The busiest day of the year was June 16th with 89 views. The most popular post that day was What’s Safe and What’s Not- Osteoporosis and Pilates Matwork.

Where did they come from?

The top referring sites in 2010 were answerbag.com, en.wordpress.com, search.aol.com, fitnessfusion.shawwebspace.ca, and google.com.

Some visitors came searching, mostly for bilateral laminectomy, facet joint degeneration, bikram yoga scoliosis, homemade stool softener, and l3 spine.

Attractions in 2010

These are the posts and pages that got the most views in 2010.

1

What’s Safe and What’s Not- Osteoporosis and Pilates Matwork January 2009
2 comments

2

Tips & Tricks: Constipation December 2007
4 comments

3

Hot Yoga – Bikram’s Yoga January 2008
5 comments

4

Tips & Tricks: Fruit Lax December 2007
1 comment

5

Back Surgery: Pilates Mat Exercises that I Can Do Now January 2008
5 comments

Incredibly Pain Free

I feel like it was all back nightmare. The pain that is. We were in San Miguel de Allende, GTO, Mexico for six weeks. The first week I had terrible pain in the hips. I am still wearing the lift in the left shoe and it is not flexible at all. The cobblestones of SMA are deep and when the shoe didn’t bend, I would almost fall off. Lots of sta’bilizers at work here. Then I had a flu. Pretty mild but I slept for probably 4 days. Didn’t do a whole lot for another 3. The pain went away. In fact most of the pain disappeared. I was fine until the night before we left and then it was back. Took the rest of the night off and was fine for the flight back home. Am I actually getting better or was it the rest that did it? Certainly makes you wonder. I have a neurophysio appointment with Robert Johnson tomorrow. We’ll see how I’m really doing then.

Still haven’t had my botox injection…waiting 10 weeks now. I’m hope that’s not cutbacks but rather staff shortages due to the holidays.

More on Piriformis Syndrome

I have now had two steroid injections into the piriformis. The first one was great and I felt normal for a short time. The second time, the radiologist managed to hit the sciatic nerve and that was a bit disastrous. I completely lost any feeling in my right leg. I couldn’t believe that the hospital let me go. They just told me  to be careful. But the leg wouldn’t take any weight and it felt like my knee was going to bend backwards…my husband had to get me out of the car and to the bottom of the stairs and he hurt his shoulder. I had to climb up the stairs on my bum and for the rest of the day, I had to ask for help to move. It was unbelievable.

The next morning there was still parts of my foot that were “frozen”. And the sciatic nerve was really irritated. Totally different. It took about a week for the irritation to go away but the piriformis is still hinkey although it is better. On Sunday Oct 11 the muscle went into spasm and would not stop. Horrible. The next day, the leg was so fatigued I couldn’t walk around the block. It’s coming and going which I’m grateful for. Before it was spasming all the time.

I saw Dr. Devonshire on Friday and she agreed that it was time to do the Botox. At least there will be a more lasting effect. I asked her what would happen if the nerve got hit again and she said that it would stop the pain fibers which is all right by me.

I have had tremendous relief from the lift in my shoe. I also had the left shoe built up all along the bottom. It is unbelievable what a difference this has made. Physio said that my leg length discrepancy was only seen on standing. Anyway, the lift puts me back in a more neutral alignment. That translates into less pain. All of a sudden I am standing straight. It’s so strange. I have exercises to do to strengthen the surrounding muscles (first stretched the piriformis but now it’s good). And we’re trying to move the ribs separate from the hips. I have been locked for a long, long time so even being able to do the side bend and move the ribs separately is a huge big deal. I”m just watching the end ranges of movement. Also strengthening proximal hamstrings. Amazing how those little things are so hard to do. One day I expect to get back on that reformer. I’m also doing the elliptical everyday or walking.

Using a TENS unit for Pain Management

I had someone ask me if I tried a TENS unit for pain management. It’s worth a try so I told her I would post the info. Back in 1994 I bought a TENS (transcutaneous electrical nerve stimulation) unit. You get one or two leads that glue or stick onto the area of pain. The opposite end goes into the unit control mechanism. I paid $600 for my unit and now they are around $150. I had two leads which gives you 4 pads. I would put them on the upper and lower limits of where I felt pain. And then you can set the amplitude, strength, pulsing or not and depending on your unit – other controls. I think that they basically work by scrambling the pain signal to the brain. It might sound hokey but I was able to get off my anti inflammatories and continuing running using just the TENS unit.

The problem lies in allergic reactions to the glue that is used to stick the pads on. It’s a very common problem and the company, Medtronics, has gone into surgical implants. It didn’t take long for the allergy to get going and I got around it by using pads without glue and then taping them in place with paper tape. That worked very well but unfortunately, the unit wasn’t so effective this time.

And I have to tell you it only works while you are wearing it. And the leads can get caught in things plus you always have the control unit and what to do with it. No dresses. You have to have something to attach the unit to.

Anyway, it does work for some people and it’s drug free. Most physio therapists will have a unit so you can try it out with their guidance and see if you are one of the lucky ones.

Still Doing Well

I feel quite fortunate to be able to say that even though the piriformis is still inflammed, I’m able to manage things. It is taking a little bit to get used to the new drug regime – cymbalta and nortriptyline – but I am getting  used to it. I really felt out of it for the first 5 weeks. The doctor told me to play around with the timing and I think that I have found a balance. I take the cymbalta at 1:30PM instead of at bedtime. I had a terrible time with my gut and pain which is what prompted the desire to change. That has been resolved and I am also no longer sleeping so much. I awake on my own between 6 and 7 which is my normal time.

How to Fix Piriformis Syndrome

It’s interesting how the body heals. It’s been about a year since my last surgery and until a month ago I was far from normal. After a lot of searching, going from doctor to doctor a neurologist found that my piriformis was really tight. Dr. Devonshire in North Vancouver tried to give me a steroid injection herself – I do not advice this as the muscle is really deep and altogether too small compared to the other muscles in the area.

Long and short is that I had a steroid injection using a CT scanner to find the exact location and after a few days I actually felt normal…unbelievable from my perspective.

So now it’s coming back and it’s only been a few weeks since that injection. Dr. Devonshire is making another appointment for a repeat injection and has referred me to a neurophysiotherapist. The idea is to get the piriformis to relax on its own. She gave me a couple of stretches and these ones on YouTube are also good.

So I’m in the midst of weaning down off the MS Contin, going from 60mg twice a day to 45mg twice a day. That for a week or more and then down to 30mg, etc

I have had the runs a couple of times during the two weeks I’ve been on Nortriptyline and we are separating the Cymbalta to take in the morning now and the Nortyptyline at night to see if that helps.

Keep in mind that this stretch isn’t meant to do after your back surgery. This is from a problem that developed because of the surgery.

Neuropathic Pain

I find it very interesting to see the pain managed so successfully with non-narcotic drugs. I’ve been in pain for years supposedly from my arthritis although my case is quite complicated. But isn’t everyone’s case different and complicated in other ways?

NSAIDs (non-steroidal anti-inflammatories) helped the pain but this was far from complete. And these types of drugs are not meant to be taken forever. The ideal case is that you get an acute inflammation from something eg spraining your ankle and you go on the NSAIDs for 10 days to aid with the healing.  Arthritis, however, is not an acute situation but rather is chronic. People go on the NSAIDs because of the pain and the drugs help to different degrees.Unless the patient is persistent about their level of pain, it often stops here. And the patients’ don’t know what is “normal” pain from arthritis. The one thing that they do know is they can’t manage many “normal” daily tasks and this can impact their quality of life (QOL) to varying degrees.

Update August 21, 2009

Well, I can hardly believe the difference between now and the last post. Let me start off by saying that the pain is well under control. In fact, most of the time during the past week I have not had any pain. That’s a show stopper.

Two weeks ago, I had to stop taking my Arthrotec (an antiinflammatory) because I was having the steroid injection into the piriformis muscle. I began taking Cymbalta several weeks prior to that. I’ve had to stop the NSAIDS before and couldn’t wait until the time I could start them again because of the increase in pain. Believe it or not, I didn’t even notice the difference. I was stunned. After a couple of days I thought the inflammation would come back and the pain would get worse. Nada. And now it’s been two weeks and I haven’t taken a single antiinflammatory.