Solving the Pain Puzzle: Cases from 25 Years as a Physical Therapist by Rick Olderman MSPT

Author:Rick Olderman, MSPT
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2023-02-27T00:00:00+00:00

10

Reading Hidden Signals: Three Pains in the Neck

My sophomore year playing high school football, I began to have frequent “stingers” in my left shoulder. Stingers are the result of a nerve getting pinched or stretched due to poor technique when tackling. These are no fun at all, as any young (or even pro) football player can tell you. They sent electric shocks down my arm. In the last part of our season, the stingers became a normal part of practice and games for me. I figured I’d have to live with them.

We had a weight training system in our basement at our farm that I would use three to four days a week. It was a Universal system, with weight stacks in the center and a bench press and pulleys on the sides. Slowly I lost the ability to hold the handles with my left hand. When bench pressing, I would twist my trunk in order to press weight off my chest on the left side—very bad form. Also while my right biceps could curl 30 pounds, I struggled with five pounds on my left. I could barely lift my left arm above my head.

I tried to ignore it, work around it, and I didn’t tell anyone. Not my coaches, not my parents. This was not from some stoic standpoint; I just never thought that it rose to the level of importance to tell anyone. After all, my arm still moved and I had no loss of sensation to my knowledge.

Football merged into wrestling season. I managed to pin a few opponents, but I found that I couldn’t use my left arm to leverage any holds or my left hand to grip. Wrestlers would pull my fingers apart as if they were cheap chopsticks. My left arm was only useful as a decoy—it really had no other value on the mat. It wasn’t until I was knocked unconscious during a match that my parents realized there was a problem. They had no idea and were properly, ­grown-up concerned. They took me to a doctor.

“Lift your arms,” he said. He placed a hand on each of mine. With a slight touch of his hand, my left arm fell down to my side like a wet noodle. He pressed harder and harder on my right. It didn’t budge. I was shocked. I knew it was weak, but this simple test revealed just how weak.

“You’ve got extensive nerve damage,” he said. I wasn’t to lift anything, not even my schoolbooks, for the next six to 10 months. My wrestling coach was not happy and made occasional derisive comments. After all, I looked completely normal, especially when I wore a long sleeve shirt to hide my skinny left arm.

The coach was young, and I don’t think he knew any better. After all, I wasn’t in a cast and had no obvious injury. That’s often how injuries went in those days and maybe to some extent today—people have a hard time empathizing with someone if they’re not in some kind of cast or don’t have a scar to show.

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