Blessing or a Curse? Musings from the Gym - Part II

It’s taken a while, but I’ve noticed a trend in good symptom days and bad symptom days.  Over the past year, my symptoms have been slowly but steadily getting worse. Not enough to cause panic, but enough to get my attention.

Yesterday was a bad symptom day.  Walking caused pain and ache in my back, both feet and calves were tingly and my left thigh was burning for most of the day.  Lying down alleiviated the tingles, but brought on the back pain.  Catch 22.  Today is a good symptom day, just mild tingling and burning in my left leg and a very, very mild back ache.  Yesterday I didn’t go to the gym, today I did.  Hmmm … upon reflection of past good days and bad days, there is a trend there.

Which leads me to consider … what if being in good shape caused my symptoms to be lessened which in turn caused a delay in the diagnosis which allowed Herm to grow bigger?

I can’t fault the medical community (aside from my first family doctor, but that’s for another post).  I have a fabulous Sports Med who has seen me through stress fractures, strains, pains and almost every running injury you can think of.  When a runner presents with mysterious tingling in the left shin, and the nerve testing reveals everything is firing as it should, well … I must have jostled, bumped or scarred my sciatic somewhere along the way. When a runner presents with lumbar pain and poor core muscles (because all they do is run), well … that’s fairly normal too.  The lumbar and hip MRI done a year and a half ago showed nothing but the beginnings of arthritis.   Aaaah, if they’d only gone up another 3 inches, they’d have found Herm.  But pain is weird and presents in strange places … at the time it was lumbar, and there was absolutely nothing unusual higher up my spine.

What if I hadn’t been running?  What if I’d been just your average Josie, busy working, shuffling kids of to this activity and the next, eating okay but sitting on the couch?  Would the doctors have looked harder?

What if I hadn't started workouts in the gym?  What if I hadn’t been keeping my back flexible, my core strong, and my legs and lungs moving hard? Would the symptoms have been worse?

Ah, the “what ifs”.  Did being fit make it better? did it make it worse.  Maybe one day the sports people and the medical people will get together and figure it out.  But for today those questions remain unanswered. I will keep working away at weight training and cardio right up until surgery day because it keeps me sane and eases my symptoms.