I threw out my shoulder-ish area doing yoga a bunch of days ago. Yup, that’s right, doing yoga. So for those of you that say you can’t get injured doing yoga, um, you can. (And on that note, have you read Vanessa’s interview with William J Broad on Recovering Yogi? He’s the New York Times writer who wrote The Science of Yoga and subsequently got slammed throughout the entire righteous, holier than thou yoga community for daring to suggest that you can actually get hurt doing the physical postures.)
The thing about this particular injury that was so awesome is that it actually happened while I was lying around watching Parks & Rec on Hulu. One minute I was trying to drink my tea without actually sitting up, and dribbling it all over my hoody*; the next I was hunched over in pain. But, with the help of my astute squadron of bodyworkers, I am feeling slightly less old and feeble. I traced the whole thing back to some particularly nefarious chaturangas I had done two days earlier. If you ever want to really whack out your thoracic, try this one-two approach:
- Spend 4 days on the East Coast subsisting on Dunkin Donuts while constantly sitting in a car or airplane.
- Then jump back into your yoga routine by doing a really hard yoga class next to your ex-boyfriend, who you ran into at yoga, and who, the last time he saw you, saw a much skinnier, younger version of you.
No bueno. I am not awesome at being sick or injured. I slide very quickly into a self-pitying miasma of woe and hopelessness. So, sorry for all of you who had to deal with it. And thanks to those of you that offered a healing hand. A special thanks to Andrew.
Andrew is a San Francisco acupuncturist who I’ve been seeing for about ten years, maybe even a little bit more. He specializes in sports injuries and pain and he is really flipping good at what he does. What he did for me last night was give me some needles in just the right spots, and then hook up some of them to the e-stim machine. Don’t make the same mistake I did and google this; I’ll just tell you. “E-stim” is short for electro-stimulation, and is basically electroshock therapy, although Andrew wouldn’t hook it up to my brain, even though I practically begged. Once the muscles chilled out from the needles and the vibration of the e-stim, he gave me a tough love massage. The muscles that were jacked were my subscapulari (plural I just made up for both of the subscapularis muscles, which live in that no-touch zone under the shoulder blades — the scapula — and are basically impossible to reach). He got into my under-the-shoulder-blade area by way of my armpit. This is how he prepped me for this episode:
“You are really not going to like this.”
Not what you want to hear while you are getting a massage.
I was crying and whining the entire time. It was intensely, awesomely painful. And it totally helped. My shoulder and neck feel way better today. I could go into some whole poetic metaphor about how sometimes you have to go through the fire to get to the clear, or how it hurt so good, or something else equally literarily redonquilous, but I’ll just leave it at this: Andrew is a genius, and you should all go to him for your injuries, yoga or other.
Oh, and he’s also awesome to talk to and doesn’t at all mind if you whine a lot! Right, Andrew? Right?
This is actually a picture that a professional photographer took of Andrew giving me acupuncture once. Long story why I even have this, but the photographer is Quinn Wharton and he’s very talented too.
* Yes, I am single. Why do you ask?
