Control Pain Flare-Ups While Vacationing
A Personal Story of How I Use Fascial Interventions Part 2
by Derrin Kluth, PT, DPT
In my last blog post, I discussed a series of interventions I did to treat the pain felt after a long trip back to see my family. This time I’d like to discuss what I was able to do during some more travelling my wife and I were lucky enough to do since then to manage my symptoms during the trip instead of after. And, like the last one, I’m hoping this anecdote will give you the reader another idea for how to use Myofascial self treatment interventions in your own life!
The last trip was a relatively easy affair on the body– some short to medium length hikes here and there but for the most part mostly flying, riding, walking, standing, getting used to new beds every few days, etc. This time, however, was going to be a whole lot more physically demanding! We had the good fortune to be able to take a couple of weeks to travel to Portugal and Spain early last fall. On a trip like this we would usually rent a car and travel around to different AirBnB’s to stay. However, the cost of car rental was exorbitant at the time so we decided we would variously bus, train, and fly between the four cities we chose to visit. Little did I know, however, that not having the time to more leisurely drive between destinations gave my body much less rest than it would have had on prior trips. If you’ve ever been to Portugal, you know that there are a LOT of ups and downs traversing their many high hills and small steps! And we set ourselves a brisk schedule so almost every day we were walking 8 or more hours mostly straight through with only relatively brief periods of standing or sitting on various transit.
You can probably see where I’m going with this. My poor knee! The one that has had some minor instability on the outside part ever since my brother jumped and landed on it when I was in cross-legged sitting when I was 11 or so. It never really bothered me too much over the years besides temporarily “popping out” once in awhile when I got up from the wrong position after which I’d just “pop it back in.” But because of that old incident my quadriceps muscles on that side have ever since had to do more work to keep my kneecap in line because the joint stability was affected. This isn’t usually an issue but hours and hours of walking up and down hills and stairs day after day was just the ticket to start my knee up complaining when those muscles just simply tired out and couldn’t do their job.
Now, I’m secure enough to admit that it hurt! And while it started as a nag after maybe day 2 or 3, it got worse very quickly after that. There are many times I’m glad and thankful that I know what know from my profession and practice, and this was definitely one of them. Without this knowledge and these techniques, I can say with fairly high certainty that I would have had to basically stop walking for the whole week and a half or so we were there after day 3. Needless to say, my knee would have ruined our vacation, and I definitely did not want that.
However, luckily I had stowed away a rubber ball in our carry on– the simplest of the tools for Myofascial intervention but by no means the least of them. I spent about 30 to 45 minutes laying face down with the ball on the painful parts of my knee the night of day 3. It was sore after but felt much better and looser overall as it had tightened up as well due to guarding from the pain, and I went to bed. Next morning I had a nag there again but it was much better and wasn’t a huge problem all the next day or the day after! Thank goodness too, because I can tell you that if I wouldn’t have been able to walk we would have missed some very amazing sights and experiences.
The small rubber ball we use for (self) Myofascial Release.
Day 6 started to get rough again, though. So as you can probably surmise I did the Myofascial intervention with the rubber ball to my knee again that night and I was better for a few more days, and so on and so forth. You get the idea, and I kept doing the intervention every few nights until we flew home. After I got back I spent a couple of hours taking care of the area so the discomfort from the vacation went away quickly, allowing me to get back to my normal routine. But anyway, the point of this story is to relate how a person can utilize the tools and interventions they learn about and how to perform, respectively, during Myofascial Release treatment to not just “clean up” the pains after a provoking incident as I described in my last blog post, but also how to “get you through” to the other side of an incident just like I did above. Then you can “clean it up” later!
Sometimes you’re in a situation where you can’t control if you’re going to have some discomfort. Sometimes you just don’t have the time to dedicate to a proper series of interventions to get a flareup under control, whether by yourself or a practitioner like me who we have at our clinic. Maybe you are on a trip with a tight schedule and high physical demand like I was. Maybe it’s “crunch time” at work and you have a month of 10 or more hour days using the computer before the holiday and you’re so tired you can barely just come home and go to sleep. Maybe the “in-laws” are visiting for a few weeks and you have to take them and the family around the city, not leaving a lot of extra time in the day. There are many situations and times in our life when the increase in total activity and effort makes it a lot harder to take the time we and our bodies need to keep things internally under control, and it’s times like these that are primed for aches and pains to come on and get worse if they aren’t addressed. And the longer they go unaddressed, the worse they get.
Visiting Europe can mean doing a LOT of stairs…
If you know how to utilize these tools like I do, and like I and we at the clinic teach our patients to do, you can use them to get yourself through the periods of increased activity and manage your symptoms so that you can properly get them back to normal later when time allows. If you live long enough you begin to realize that in a big picture way, that cycle of more intense and less intense is kind of how life flows day to day, month to month, and year to year. By making these interventions a part of that flow you can make the physical aspect of your quality of life much better for it and get a whole lot more enjoyment out of it. Or at least a whole lot less suffering and pain! Either way or both, it’s better than not having any control at all.
Traveling during March Break? If this story or the discussion after strikes a chord with you, or if you’d just like to start learning how to take some control of those things that can limit us in our life and our enjoyment of it, feel free to book an appointment at our clinic. We have many great practitioners who know the ins and outs of chronic pain and can empower you and help you through to the other side where you can take your life back. And we’d like nothing better than to be able to help you tell a story like this of your own one day!
Disclaimer: As an Amazon Associate, we earn from qualifying purchases.