Thanks NFIP. It didn't even earn an injury so this is very weird. The later the evening the worse it gets, so I'm hoping it (again) improves for tomorrow morning. Living in a regional town means we aren't exactly blessed with sports physios, though they must be about as there are lots of sports being played here. I'm strangely grateful this has not happened just before a ski trip? Time to sort it out I guess.
Stacked hard on Saturday morning. One of those ‘running it in, looking behind me, didn’t see the hole, jettisoned over the metaphoric handlebars, double bounced on my chest’ things... I’ve kept boarding, just popped a few voltaren and put a heat pack on it. Was feeling better each day. Until yesterday. Now I’m in a world of hurt.... go figure. Went to Physio yesterday. She thinks 3rd and 4th ribs - cracked or torn cartilage. Ice/Compression etc. I think the heat packs plus drinking Monday night (wasn’t drunk but body was likely too busy processing alcohol to deal with the inflammation of the rib injury) pushed me over the edge. House mate is full of flu. I’m terrified I’m going to catch it coz I sure as hell cant cough effectively.
As you get older you can get a chronic (cp acute) meniscus tear just lying around. It's a bugger not having a war story to tell about it.
Damn.... thought you'd dodged it there the other day LMB. Scans in Kutchan courtesy Travel insurance next stop ? Good hospital there ! , first hand obs . Hope goes smooth .
Yeah. I’m playing it Day by day. Not a lot they can do for ribs, but if it gets any worse I’ll get scans.
Thats true. Just gotta let them heal. I'm sure you are right up to speed with this sort of stuff there Mum.
Amateur opinion follows beware. It's possible your patella isn't tracking properly and that can be due to a knee muscle being too tight. So lie down and with the other heel press into those muscles and if you find a tender one then work it as hard as you can without generating pain. Keep that up for a few days. Check both knees in the mirror while you're standing - is the sore side bigger than the other? You've got swelling and you should do the RICE thing. Things can get more complicated than this. The pain may lead to a muscle being turned off, and without that activating the joint doesn't function properly and other pains are generated. One thing you can try is to lie down and gently drive the knee downwards. Is the sore side working as well as the good side? If not, go find a physio. Doesn't have to be a sports physio - there are competent practitioners who don't label themselves as sports.
Thanks Ziggy. The pain just got worse and worse as the evening wore on. I couldn't sleep at all due to the throbbing but found an ice pack alleviated the throbbing at least and I caught a few Z's. Can't get into a physio until Sat, so I will try your suggestions as I have very little to lose. Much appreciated. I would understand if this pain was the consequence of charging down Zalis flat out, but I didn't do anything.
I hit HARD Wombie. I reckon if I had an upgraded version they’d have exploded. Sitting in the middle of flu central at NIC waiting to get chest X-rays. FFS, I was here at opening and and more than an hour later I’m still waiting!
Yeah. Good luck with it. The patella only needs to track a mm or two off and you get trouble. It's a finely tuned instrument the knee.
Bugger LMB . Wonder if there’s a phobia name for fear of sneezing and coughing with broken ribs . Definitely had it if so .
No clear break on imaging. Most likely the cartilage - which is what I’d assumed. But scans needed doing as I had a bit of a crisis in the wee hours this morning - unable to breathe. Bit scary. Turns out being a stoic tough nut and not keeping the meds up is a bad idea if you want to breathe. Much better now I’m staying topped up. I’ll be all good before you know it.
Ouchie IMO tearing the muscle off your ribs hurts more than breaking them. I couldn't wipe my bum for a week.
Glad there’s no breaks but it will still take a while.. speedy healing! Keep the pain relief going to give it a chance. As for the cough/sneeze/laugh phobia... hell yeah, had that too!
Ooh, I've been there, 3 broken ribs from car smash, nothing worse than knowing you're about to sneeze, and can't stop it!
Cheers all. Yeah I’ve broken a few ribs before and torn the intercostals but it’s all been mid to lower ribs. I agree @Donzah re: which is worse. This one threw me a bit because it’s so high up.The impact was my sternum, so it’s more like a seatbelt injury. Initially winded, felt bruised for a few days and just took some voltaren and got on with it. Was still out there riding without reservation. I didn’t expect it to suddenly turn crazy painful (especially as I have a relatively high pain threshold). At least I know what’s what now and can happily pop the pain pills without having that niggling concern in the back of my mind that maybe I can’t take a breathe because of some other (more serious) reason.
My back (sacrum area) still hurts more than 2 weeks after falling on my first day at Niseko. I landed on a hard-packed surface and saw stars for a couple of mins, couldn't move. The pain flared up and down over the time I was skiing, managed with regular ibuprofen. Occasionally I moved in a certain way (skiing and not) and the pain was searing, most recently 2 days ago when I tripped on a tree root. If I have some kind of fracture is there any point getting it diagnosed and treated? Or is there nothing that can be done anyway?
Had something similar on Falls Creek's best concrete. The local physio diagnosed a disc tear. Wasn't sure about that. I have worn facet joints and they flare up when ground together. The pain means that the TA turns off and then the hip flexors try to compensate. That then compresses and curves the lumbar spine making it all worse. In your case anti-inflammatories are a good idea but perhaps for no more than a week because they are prone to raising blood pressure. You should get a diagnosis. And rest lol.
This. ^^ Best get it checked out then you know what it is and can make a plan so that there is no flow on injuries as the rest of the back , hips etc compensate for the injury and do more damage..
Physio check up 1 week after an ultrasonically guided cortisone injection into my ankle peroneal tendon sheath (blardy painful little jab) All good so far with reduced pain, swelling and inflammation, still should get 1 more week of improvement then see how it maintains over the next month. Still have to work on the flexibility but given the OK to ride Thredbo MTB on the long weekend.
Physio at this stage to manage the inflammation and avoid the excesses of compensation. Fillums can do more harm than good.
Book both. Physio might help with ensuring the surrounding muscles are not in spasm and everything is in the right spot. Scan should highlight if there is any serious damage. It might be that it’s just to alleviate that niggling doubt and allow you to let time take its course.
The new neuroscience of pain shows that at this stage a film of the problem will for many people increase the experience of pain. Conservative therapy should be tried first.
Yep Patella Tedonitis according to the physio. Ice, compression, elevation all helped and by the time I saw the Physio, I was walking pretty normal. Still, I wanted confirmation and advise on how to prevent it in the future. It still aches every now and again, but I will be doing quad strength exercises to strengthen the whole knee structure, particularly before I go skiing. Thanks again for the suggestions.
Films worked a treat for me this week. I had quite a lump/swollen area, extreme difficulty taking a breath and couldn’t cough effectively even when preparing for it. Scan showed no obvious break and clear lungs. Therefore gave me the confidence to just up the pain meds and get through it. Worked a treat and shut up the nagging from the peanut gallery that I should do this, do that and not go snowboarding. I suppose it depends on the person.
I'm a great one for soldiering on for a bit . Like LMB after couple of days it's not letting up gotta listen to your body and try play it smarter. Especially now the 20 yo mind can not always be relied upon , lets just say
A bad image persuades people they should be suffering. But the theory of pain has moved beyond Newtonian mechanics.
I do wonder... If you are a hypochondriac you’d rush off to get a scan for every bump and you’d be more likely to ‘feel’ pain. For those of us like @nfip and I it’s a last resort when either a partner is giving you hell or you have a scare that it’s worse than you thought. We are hoping for a clean result so we can just man up and put the concerns behind us. So many variables in research, and hard to control for all the other influencing factors. Hard to even see they are there at times. Especially if you’re hell bent on proving a theory.
Pain is not as simple as everyone used to believe. Pain is not automatic: it is a response by the (unconscious) brain to inputs it's receiving. Those inputs can be very broad and so can the responses. For many conditions there is SFA correlation between symptoms and images. It's not a matter of hypochondria or psychosomatic inventions. Some people with horrible physical problems have very little pain while others with much milder problems in a scan have worse pain. Scans can be very useful, but clinical symptoms and investigation are more significant I'm no expert on this stuff but unfortunately have more first hand experience that I would like
Given that I am in almost constant pain anyway (and have been for over 2 weeks), I can't imagine a scan is going to make me feel any worse. Rather it might tell me that rather than getting back into running and yoga I might be better off resting and/or getting some treatment. Having given birth to two children the old fashioned way I understand the power of mind-over-matter when it comes to pain, and also of using pain as a signal on what action to take (eg. PUSH GODDAMMIT!!!) I'll see when I can get an appointment with the physio - if they think it is necessary they will send me for a scan.
If you’ve got a good Physio you trust that sounds like a plan. My Physio at home is a savant! I’d trust him to make that call.
I was gonna to say something along the same lines. Do you have a good relationship with your physio and trust their judgement? If so start there. Otherwise GP. And i didn't mean to imply that mind over matter is what it's about. Just that scans should be used to support clinical diagnosis, not as a starting point.
Problem I’ve got is “Dr Missy” (me) has already diagnosed and prescribed before I’ve ever seen a dr or Physio
A primer on theories of pain ... A body part suffers trauma and the nerves send a pain signal to the brain, like a servant's bell. The greater the trauma the louder the bell. Ringing bell theory. But hold on, what about those soldiers running towards the enemy who feel a dull thud but continue till they find cover, thank their lucky stars, look down and wonder where all the blood is coming from? Oh well, there's a kind of gate that stops the bell in the brain from ringing. Pain-gate theory. So pharma companies try to activate or create a gate with meds. Hold on again. In an era of mass imaging what's emerged is that some folk with trauma or degeneration experience pain and others don't. In the case of the worst category of knee arthritis, some 25% of people don't. And poor sods who've had a limb amputated feel pain in it. Those brilliant pain gate meds stop working. Without any physical change in a chronic condition your experience of pain will vary according to how you are in yourself at the moment. So what's going on? We have squillions of receptors that sense noxious stimuli and send messages up the central nervous system (nociception). These are danger signals. The brain interprets them as pain or not, as high or low pain, depending on experience and expectations. Give someone who's had an injury an image of it with the damage gloriously depicted and they will expect to feel pain. (A controlled test has been done. The experience and recovery was worse where folk had images cp those who didn't). So this doesn't matter a huge amount in an acute episode but it becomes important to have the correct conception of pain when you're dealing with a chronic condition. We know that medicine has failed in treating chronic pain and if it's running off the ringing bell or pain gate theory then that's probably why. Pain is a learned response of the brain to those danger signals. Therapy should address reducing the trauma where possible of course but in chronic conditions, drugs or the knife have limited application and the focus should shift to what influences your experience of pain. ... Sources: Lorimer Moseley youtube vids. Moseley and Butler Explain Pain. This deals with the science of pain. http://www.noigroup.com/en/product/epbii Explain Pain Handbook A plain language introduction to the science along with exercises to help sufferers understand and manage their pain. http://www.noigroup.com/en/Product/EPHPB On Moseley's cred: https://bodyinmind.org/who-are-we/ I've taught public health and the sociology of health in medicine and health science courses at two Melb unis. A physio introduced me to the neuroscience of pain as an alternative way of thinking about my chronic spine, knee and hand conditions. It requires a conceptual change and we humans aren't very good at that. Edited.
