Sunday, August 15, 2010

More Breakthroughs

Beighton  Thumb move
I probably shouldn't be celebrating this one, but I now have a Beighton Score of 7 - just managed my right thumb for the first time this evening!! Any physiotherapist or rheumatologist reading this probably won't think it is necessary for me to keep increasing my Beighton Score, but it is interesting that I can 'acquire' this extra hypermobility even at my age(!!!). This means that I have hypermobility in my neck, shoulders, elbows, lumbar spine, hips, knees and thumbs. Just fingers and ankles to go!!

I realised this evening that apart from fatigue, my body has settled again which means it is probably the right time to have more physiotherapy. It seems that the more 'reactive' my body becomes and the more turbulent things are, the more actual help I want from my physiotherapist, the less she is really able to do or be supportive purely because too much is going on in my body. That is when it looks like it is going to be better doing things like Bowen, Craniosacral Therapy and Reiki.

Since my calves are behaving so much better, I had a sudden thought that perhaps I no longer need any more physiotherapy, but unfortunately my upper body is far from being organised and a great deal of work still needs to be done to make thoracic spine functional at all and to improve my neck pain. I also realise how very unstable my shoulder joints (and hypermobile elbows) are and how out of control they feel compared to other parts of my body - e.g. lumbar spine and knee which now have much improved levels of movement and proprioceptive control. I was doing an exercise called Windmills in Pilates with M yesterday, and I got in a right flap. M told me to stop thinking about the movement quite so hard, but I was utterly overwhelmed with the movement of the arms. My shoulders were all over the place, I couldn't sense where my arms were and in which direction they should have been and my coordination was shot to pieces. This is why I still need more physiotherapy and ongoing Pilates. I will certainly also have more Feldenkrais again as that is also excellent.

I have come a long way, but there seems to be so much more to do still!

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