100 Butts

What is this post going to be about, you might wonder. Well, I have received one more exercise from my physio – perhaps the final exercise – and she calls it a 'bum' exercise, being English. I like to refer to it as a 'butt' exercise, since after living here for almost ten years I still feel silly saying 'bum'. I suppose one could sound more technical and call it a 'glute' exercise.

No matter what you call it, I have to be able to do 100 of them on both sides before I am allowed to swim again. Evil woman! It was a dirty, if effective tactic, to get me to actually do them before I start building in other activities again. I'm up to 50.

So the good news is before too long I should be swimming again, but the really good news is that all the MRIs on my spine and hips came back clear – no slipped disc or anything else. (If you're just joining this blog, the background on this particular story can be found here.)

And after doing about a gazillion hip stretches on the side where my back was hurting, the pain is almost completely gone. So we were being overly cautious with the scans, but at least I can rest assured that it was all residual muscle pain from either my fall down the stairs pre-wedding or the yoga injury made worse by jumping around on it, or maybe even just a lack of hip stretching. Whatever the reason, Super Physio has fixed it – or rather I have fixed it with exercises and stretches.

I don't want to speak too soon here, but for the first time in nearly six years – since I originally started work on my RSI and my more recent back injury from moving house a year ago – I feel really well in my body. And I just want to say, for anyone out there who is currently in pain and is putting in the hard physio work, it's worth it. Don't give up, because getting better is possible. I've had some really dark hours, lots of tears and lots of sweat. It's not just been a mechanical muscle problem, but a work problem (a too-stressful job) and a health problem (chronic sore throat that ended in a tonsillectomy) that also had to be tackled. And it took a long time – but I did it.

Who knows what the future holds for my body. You can't control everything – accidents do happen and age plays a part too. But for now, in this moment, things are good and I'm going to bask in it, at least for a little while.

And only 50 more butts to go.

Related Posts:

• On Back Ache
• What I Can Do
• Why I Pity My Friends