Soundtracks of my Physical Therapy
Recently I downloaded a fitness app and was dismayed to discover that it does not have "physical therapy" on the main menu. Nor were there options for "weight lifting, but with my legs," "pelvic tilts," or "Theraband stuff."
I was furious until I reminded myself that most people, i.e. people with better physical luck than I, don't have to do those exercises three times a week for over 7 years.
I am currently on round 9, soon to be 10, of physical therapy. Way back in 2010, my therapists assured me I'd someday be able to phase out therapy and do regular exercise.
Optimism may be a form of moral courage, but it's not a great fortune teller.
Despite the best efforts of at least 10 therapists in three states, I've been stuck in a cycle.
In seven long years of cycling, I've learned a few things:
PT Round 1: Diagnostics and Arrested Development, Singin' in the Rain, etc.
It all began as a sudden, overwhelming pain in my lower back. I was living in a dorm at Boston College then, so fortunately I had a roommate to lift me into bed for the night. The next day at the student health center, the sports medicine doctor gave me some printouts of suggested stretches. I dutifully tried them twice a day for three months.
The exercises came with animal-themed descriptions. I let my roommate pick what we watched while I was crawling around on the floor, attempting to contort into "camel" "cat" "sad cow" and "seal."
When that didn't help, I was referred to a professional physical therapist. Within an hour, he'd guessed that I probably had a herniated disk pinching a nerve in my back.
Now he was a good guesser.
PT Round 2: Core Strengthening and the Arab Spring
In addition to a good guesser, my first PT was a very nice man. He gave me tons of individual attention, and we had some great conversations. That spring, CNN was on pretty much constantly. He knew I was studying the Middle East, so he asked me for my opinions on the situations in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, etc. I was pretty optimistic that they might see more democracy in their futures.
Depressingly, I was 1 for 3 on that prediction.
PT Round 3: Core Strengthening and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
After that first round of therapy, I had a series of cortisone shots and a whole summer pain-free. So I stopped doing my home PT and started living a normal life again.
I re-injured myself in week 1 of my junior year of college.
I had more cortisone shots, and more PT. By now I'd realized that I couldn't do my home program without something to entertain myself. There were fewer online streaming options in those days, so I tried listening to recordings of an old radio show.
The premise of this show is that an insurance investigator is writing up his expense report for a case, and explains every line item by telling a part of the mystery he was trying to solve. E.g. "Item: 10 cents for a payphone, which I used to call a cab after the dame with bleach-blonde hair stole my bicycle." Every episode ends with him reading the total and signing the expense report Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. It says something about pre-TV society that this program ran for over a decade.
Unfortunately, I got bored of the radio show and stopped doing my home program.
PT Round 4: Surgical Recovery and Supernatural
I had my first surgery over Thanksgiving break of my senior year of college. I went to more PT and got yet another home program.
Determined to get better this time, I forced myself to get on the floor and do all the exercises every weekday from 11-12. By total coincidence, that was the same time slot in which TNT played Supernatural reruns.
I learned several things that year:
I was pretty sad about that last one.
PT Round 5: Surgery Prevention, How I Met Your Mother, and Call the Midwife
The goal was to avoid a second surgery. I went into more cortisone shots and yet more PT. I also graduated college and started my first full-time job, which did not pay well, so I ended up living in a fourth-floor walk-up in Salem, MA, aka the Land with No Parking Spaces. I walked and walked and climbed up and down stairs (with my laundry, with my groceries, with garbage bags) - all with a compressed nerve and no feeling in one of my legs. Yeah.
To cope with how weird and painful my life had gotten, I quickly became addicted to two TV shows.
How I Met Your Mother became my go-to for some cheer-me-up humor.
Call the Midwife, on the other hand, served as a reminder that socialized medicine is awesome . . .
. . . but mid-century London still sucked. There's not much a doctor can do if the air is literally choking you.
PT Round 6: Surgical Recovery and Daytime Jeopardy!
By spring 2014, it was clear my attempts to avoid more surgery had failed. Since Sunday is Father's Day, I'm going to digress here and recount a memorable conversation I had around May of 2014.
Me: I need more surgery, and it's gonna be a very hard recovery.
Dad: OK, you'll come home. Pack your bags, I'll come this weekend to move you out of your apartment.
(end digression)
Back to NJ I went. Unlike some of my peers, who moved into their childhood bedrooms when times got tough, I moved into my parents' first-floor living room. The recovery was as hard as promised.
For almost 6 months, I saw a physical therapist 3 times a week at 2:30. That was intentional: Daytime Jeopardy came on at 3PM and the staff liked to play against me. They were a great group of people, and partially inspired my upcoming audition for Jeopardy!
Then, I got my current job and had to strike out into a new city.
PT Round 7: Back Rubs in the Twilight Zone
When I first moved to NYC, I found a very convenient therapy practice near my office. It turned out to consist of one woman and a few exercise machines. On day 1, I was told to change into my sweatpants in her broom closet.
I didn't last long enough there to need a regular TV show.
PT Round 8: Nerve damage and Game of Thrones
I started over at a therapy practice in Brooklyn. My insurance company cut me down to 1 trip per week, so in between I did - say it with me now - another home program. I signed up for HBO Now to help motivate myself.
Unfortunately, I was still in pain. Eventually my nerve damage was diagnosed as permanent. My insurance company declared me a lost cause shortly after that.
PT Round 9: Gait training to the tune of Parks & Recreation, Cheers, The Good Wife, The Wire, Remington Steele, etc.
The following spring, my doctor convinced the insurance company that I could stop limping, in spit of the nerve issues, if I had more gait training. This time, I lasted 3 months with a therapist before the insurance company had had enough.
From July 2016 until this very afternoon, I've done my home program religiously. I have subscriptions to Netflix, Amazon Prime, HBO Now, CBS All Access, and Hulu (thanks for sharing, Katie!) I pick a show to binge-watch, and every time I see an episode I get down on the floor to exercise.
The fact that I don't have a line of sight from my floor to my TV does mean that we're playing it fast and loose with the word "see," though.
PT Round 10: Fix Claire's right knee (entertainment TBD)
Alas, my limp is still not cured. It has developed a sense of irony, instead. My left leg has a limp, and so my right leg has to do extra work. My right knee recently decided that it doesn't like that arrangement. Now I have pain in both legs.
In Conclusion
My next round of PT starts Tuesday, and I'm on season 2 of the underrated 1982-1987 dramedy Remington Steele. Only one of those things has a clear end in sight. I am now accepting suggestions on what to binge-watch next.
After all, physical therapy might not cure me, but at least it's something to do while I'm experiencing all the great art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
I was furious until I reminded myself that most people, i.e. people with better physical luck than I, don't have to do those exercises three times a week for over 7 years.
I am currently on round 9, soon to be 10, of physical therapy. Way back in 2010, my therapists assured me I'd someday be able to phase out therapy and do regular exercise.
Optimism may be a form of moral courage, but it's not a great fortune teller.
Despite the best efforts of at least 10 therapists in three states, I've been stuck in a cycle.
 |
| Be in pain, go to a physical therapist, get cut off by insurance, try to keep up with a home plan, do something wrong, be in pain, rinse and repeat. |
In seven long years of cycling, I've learned a few things:
- Just because your spine feels like it's all aligned, does not mean it is.
- Do not stop doing your PT when you start to feel better. It's a trap.
- Insurance companies will cut you off for improving too much, not improving enough, or simply for existing.
- If you want to stay sane during all of this, you're going to need entertainment.
PT Round 1: Diagnostics and Arrested Development, Singin' in the Rain, etc.
It all began as a sudden, overwhelming pain in my lower back. I was living in a dorm at Boston College then, so fortunately I had a roommate to lift me into bed for the night. The next day at the student health center, the sports medicine doctor gave me some printouts of suggested stretches. I dutifully tried them twice a day for three months.
The exercises came with animal-themed descriptions. I let my roommate pick what we watched while I was crawling around on the floor, attempting to contort into "camel" "cat" "sad cow" and "seal."
When that didn't help, I was referred to a professional physical therapist. Within an hour, he'd guessed that I probably had a herniated disk pinching a nerve in my back.
Now he was a good guesser.
PT Round 2: Core Strengthening and the Arab Spring
In addition to a good guesser, my first PT was a very nice man. He gave me tons of individual attention, and we had some great conversations. That spring, CNN was on pretty much constantly. He knew I was studying the Middle East, so he asked me for my opinions on the situations in Tunisia, Egypt, Syria, etc. I was pretty optimistic that they might see more democracy in their futures.
Depressingly, I was 1 for 3 on that prediction.
PT Round 3: Core Strengthening and Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar
After that first round of therapy, I had a series of cortisone shots and a whole summer pain-free. So I stopped doing my home PT and started living a normal life again.
 |
| It's a trap! |
I re-injured myself in week 1 of my junior year of college.
I had more cortisone shots, and more PT. By now I'd realized that I couldn't do my home program without something to entertain myself. There were fewer online streaming options in those days, so I tried listening to recordings of an old radio show.
The premise of this show is that an insurance investigator is writing up his expense report for a case, and explains every line item by telling a part of the mystery he was trying to solve. E.g. "Item: 10 cents for a payphone, which I used to call a cab after the dame with bleach-blonde hair stole my bicycle." Every episode ends with him reading the total and signing the expense report Yours Truly, Johnny Dollar. It says something about pre-TV society that this program ran for over a decade.
Unfortunately, I got bored of the radio show and stopped doing my home program.
PT Round 4: Surgical Recovery and Supernatural
I had my first surgery over Thanksgiving break of my senior year of college. I went to more PT and got yet another home program.
Determined to get better this time, I forced myself to get on the floor and do all the exercises every weekday from 11-12. By total coincidence, that was the same time slot in which TNT played Supernatural reruns.
I learned several things that year:
- If you start debating the relative mortality rates of women on Supernatural and women in James Bond movies, you will continue debating that for approximately the rest of your life.
- They really should've canceled Supernatural after Season 5.
- Nerve damage won't magically heal after back surgery, despite what your surgeon tells you pre-op.
I was pretty sad about that last one.
 |
| Sam and Dean Winchester were very sad . . . just in general. |
PT Round 5: Surgery Prevention, How I Met Your Mother, and Call the Midwife
The goal was to avoid a second surgery. I went into more cortisone shots and yet more PT. I also graduated college and started my first full-time job, which did not pay well, so I ended up living in a fourth-floor walk-up in Salem, MA, aka the Land with No Parking Spaces. I walked and walked and climbed up and down stairs (with my laundry, with my groceries, with garbage bags) - all with a compressed nerve and no feeling in one of my legs. Yeah.
To cope with how weird and painful my life had gotten, I quickly became addicted to two TV shows.
How I Met Your Mother became my go-to for some cheer-me-up humor.
 |
| This was before the depressing ending. |
 |
| (From the show: 1950s nurses proudly holding happy babies) |
. . . but mid-century London still sucked. There's not much a doctor can do if the air is literally choking you.
PT Round 6: Surgical Recovery and Daytime Jeopardy!
By spring 2014, it was clear my attempts to avoid more surgery had failed. Since Sunday is Father's Day, I'm going to digress here and recount a memorable conversation I had around May of 2014.
Me: I need more surgery, and it's gonna be a very hard recovery.
Dad: OK, you'll come home. Pack your bags, I'll come this weekend to move you out of your apartment.
(end digression)
Back to NJ I went. Unlike some of my peers, who moved into their childhood bedrooms when times got tough, I moved into my parents' first-floor living room. The recovery was as hard as promised.
For almost 6 months, I saw a physical therapist 3 times a week at 2:30. That was intentional: Daytime Jeopardy came on at 3PM and the staff liked to play against me. They were a great group of people, and partially inspired my upcoming audition for Jeopardy!
Then, I got my current job and had to strike out into a new city.
PT Round 7: Back Rubs in the Twilight Zone
When I first moved to NYC, I found a very convenient therapy practice near my office. It turned out to consist of one woman and a few exercise machines. On day 1, I was told to change into my sweatpants in her broom closet.
I didn't last long enough there to need a regular TV show.
PT Round 8: Nerve damage and Game of Thrones
I started over at a therapy practice in Brooklyn. My insurance company cut me down to 1 trip per week, so in between I did - say it with me now - another home program. I signed up for HBO Now to help motivate myself.
 |
| By this point I was jealous of Bran Stark. He isn't in pain, since he can't feel anything, and he has a friendly giant to carry him around. |
Unfortunately, I was still in pain. Eventually my nerve damage was diagnosed as permanent. My insurance company declared me a lost cause shortly after that.
PT Round 9: Gait training to the tune of Parks & Recreation, Cheers, The Good Wife, The Wire, Remington Steele, etc.
The following spring, my doctor convinced the insurance company that I could stop limping, in spit of the nerve issues, if I had more gait training. This time, I lasted 3 months with a therapist before the insurance company had had enough.
 |
| They could save paper by simply writing "Explanation of Benefits: None." |
The fact that I don't have a line of sight from my floor to my TV does mean that we're playing it fast and loose with the word "see," though.
PT Round 10: Fix Claire's right knee (entertainment TBD)
Alas, my limp is still not cured. It has developed a sense of irony, instead. My left leg has a limp, and so my right leg has to do extra work. My right knee recently decided that it doesn't like that arrangement. Now I have pain in both legs.
In Conclusion
My next round of PT starts Tuesday, and I'm on season 2 of the underrated 1982-1987 dramedy Remington Steele. Only one of those things has a clear end in sight. I am now accepting suggestions on what to binge-watch next.
After all, physical therapy might not cure me, but at least it's something to do while I'm experiencing all the great art of the 20th and 21st centuries.
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