Back Update

I had my first physical therapy appointment today since I got the news that I'd broke my back. It went pretty well, with focus on trying to reduce the nerve pain in my leg and foot. The stress fracture was obviously a complicating factor but not the original cause of it.

As far as my back goes, I broke it so long ago that they weren't able to give me much info on what to expect from the healing process. The therapist said it's normally an 8 to 10 week healing process for that type of fracture. But since I've been living my life as normal this whole time, it probably slowed down the healing somewhat. She suggested since it showed up on the X-ray as recently as two weeks ago, to give it another month avoiding lifting anything heavy or twisting my back. But at this point my back should be fine.

What she said about the nerve pain is a little more interesting. I've been saying over the past several years that it feels like having broken my ankle all those years ago could be contributing to it. But every doctor I've talked to has basically said, 'no it's not that. It's an unrelated issue.' This was originally why I wanted to have surgery to remove the plate in my leg, because I thought that might've been contributing to it as well. And after I had it removed, I did see some improvement, although it never went away entirely.

The physical therapist is the first person I've met who said that the original injury from breaking my leg and subsequent stiffness in my ankle could in fact be contributing to the nerve pain. She described it as a sort of feedback loop, where I'm favoring my left side because it doesn't quite bend the same way as my right side, which in turn leads to it being weaker, which leads to me favoring it more and so on. Over 15+ years this can lead to constantly moving my back in a particular way to favor my left side, which can lead to nerve pain on that side of my body. Which then leads to me favoring it more, which leads to more pain, etc.

I'll be doing a lot of ankle and muscle stretching on that side, and eventually doing more exercises to strengthen that leg. That should help with my posture and gait too and ultimately (hopefully) with the nerve pain as well.

So yeah, at this point I should be okay. And with any luck I'll be doing even better over the next few months now that I'm actually having all this addressed.