Massage therapy

One of the saving graces I have discovered that really helps with my health is massage therapy.

I come from a long line of Lovers-of-Backrubs; that’s a family trait and filters through even with the animals. There’s nothing like that ooo-ahhh feeling of having the tightness in shoulders and neck squeezed and pinched by a cooperative family member or friend. It interrupts the pain and gives moments of sweet relief. And actually just the contact is so centering.

But getting a backrub is different from massage therapy. Massage therapists employ their knowledge of muscle anatomy and the way the muscles connect and interact to work with the knots, spasms, trigger points, etc. to create a longer lasting improvement to the state of your muscles.

I had long wanted to try massage therapy, but years ago “real” massage therapists weren’t so very common and available. Even inquiring about one to a general group of folks was more likely to elicit sniggers than answers.

Then circa 1982 as I came down the staff stairway at the office I slipped on a pencil someone had dropped and fell and bounced down the concrete steps. Ouch! I wrenched my back and it spasmed like crazy. Doctor attempts to drug the situation didn’t do anything — muscle relaxants, inflammation relievers just left me groggy and still twisted up on one side.

I was in agony and had no sympathy from anyone. When drugs don’t work, a lot of docs just shrug and move on.

Fortunately there was someone at the office who had heard about a practice that did massage therapy and gave me a flyer she had gotten and had been considering. I finally got up the nerve to make the call after perusing all the pictures which described the pain the fall had given me, as well as other pain I had been living with since I broke my neck 10 years earlier. I was so nervous! “Nice people” didn’t get massage.

I made the arrangement and, come the day, made the drive to the nearby town to their office. That began a long appreciation and relationship with beneficial therapeutic massage. Over a series of sessions, the muscles in my back were slowly worked and stretched back out into their normal shape, the pain trigger points were dealt with so that their power was interrupted, I was straightened, strengthened, lengthened.

Something that was nearly miraculous to me was a huge improvement in my neck. For 10 years after the surgery that fused my hangman’s break back together in my neck and wired several vertebra together, I had barely been able to turn my head from side to side. About the most I could manage was for my chin to move about 1-1/2 inches left or right of center.

I had developed a compensatory habit (which I still apparently do) of moving my shoulders to the side where I needed to turn, and, with all the related tight muscles, my shoulders didn’t move that far. I would overhear people (who didn’t know I was ‘broken’ and didn’t know me) whisper and comment that I must be ’stuck-up’ or snooty because of the stiff way I barely moved.

Doctors over those years just told me that was my lot in life and that I would never be able to move my head. “Just forget about it and be glad you’re alive.” Well, I was glad I was alive, but I wasn’t glad I couldn’t turn my head.

Connie, my therapist, couldn’t help but notice my immobility. At the end of each session working on my back she started spending a few minutes working on the muscles of my neck. There was no great “aha!” or sudden orchestra-announced dramatic moment. Just — one moment I couldn’t really turn my head and I was in constant sapping pain. In another moment, my head turned several inches and the pain was missing. With more work, there was more movement. I was “gobsmacked“!

After enormous joy and amazement, I couldn’t help it. I was so angry with all of those doctors who had drugged me and then given up on me and left me to a lifetime of a frozen position and burning pain. How could they not know and share something as “simple” as the knowledgeable working of my muscles to free me from both? It still makes me fume from time to time.

I moved on from that part of the country to another, then another, and didn’t have the funds or the time to have further therapy. The serendipitous gift of that hard fall on concrete stairs had been that insurance covered the cure attempts. I hoped that that wouldn’t happen again.

Some years later when I lived in another “River City”/ “Scenic City” working in a job that was really tough. The environment was mean-spirited, pressure-laden, demeaning, full of yelling, pitting of people against each other for sport, extremely long hours, no reward. It was a tough place to be (although it is one where you were forced to learn a lot about the industry I had fallen in to).

I don’t know if you’ve found this to be true, but for me stress unmitigated will find its way to get your attention through wherever you are most vulnerable at the time. Sometimes, usually, it is my back and neck. In the Scenic City it was chomping on my heart. Shortness of breath, palpitations, feeling faint, etc etc etc. Again docs couldn’t help me.

I started looking around and inquiring and came across a likely massage therapist. He began working on me and unknotted and released rope after rope of the stress I had tangled up inside and it seemed to take so much pressure off of my heart. Sometimes I had to go see him a couple of times a week, but as his efforts made larger and larger differences, he cut back on the frequency of appointments needed (a really telling sign of honesty to me). I continued to see him the remainder of the years that I lived there. He actually, in that time, put together an accredited school for teaching others massage therapy. I truly believed he saved my life.

Since then I try to find a massage therapist wherever I am for at least an occasional tune-up. Some have been better than others. They all have different touches and styles.

Here I have been lucky enough to find a fellow who comes to the house from time to time, a luxury that is really nice because then I can just collapse afterwards and drink water and leave my muscles relaxed. He is the blind fiance of one of my co-workers, and she drives him over and watches tv with Chick (whether Chick is up for it or not) in the den while I am worked on in the living room. When we are through I get a hug and they pack up and leave and I melt into a puddle.

It really helps. I still have trouble with my pain and the immobility in my neck (which I’ve not been able to keep as flexible as Connie first got it 25 years ago, but it is vastly better than the condition the docs had abandoned me to). I will still tighten up and feel a foot and a half smaller than full height– the small batteries of life, MS, fibromyalgia will get me. If I could wave a wand and have anything I wanted I would get massage 3x a day and I know it would make me ‘love life’ a lot better.

When we view our day, our life, from our pinched, compressed, knotted, pained bodies, it is challenging to run and embrace each day with whole, happy hearts. We can’t help but feel a little skewed in how we look at things and experience what is going on, what our tolerance is for the ripples and waves that come floating at us. Massage therapy may not be the answer for helping everyone with that, but it makes a difference for me.

Which is a reason why, as I review and collect the restrictions that different stores impose on the properties in which they set up shop, I shake my head and laugh a bit at the frowning prohibition against “massage parlors”. There is “that” connotation, although you don’t see that type of operation in “first-class centers”. Too bad those old, lingering sneers might still keep needful folks from feeling the courage to find the help they need from a certified therapist.

“It’s a good thing.”