1. Heat Treatment/Home Therapy
2a. Get Help
When the arm is warmed up, Jon does an incredible job, kneading through scar tissue, swelling, bruising, and pain.
We've been paying attention to the ligaments behind my elbow. These were not torn during the fall, but they have bunched up and created a concrete-like wall, preventing flexion. This wall and the atrophied biceps/triceps need attention.
2b. Get More Help
After I am massaged, the real work begins. Jon manipulates my arm, bringing it to 90 degrees, pushing into that wall of pain, and then reverses the action, stretching it as far down by my side as it can go.
3. Mind Over Matter
I was very bothered by being told to work harder. If anything, I've often been told by Popo, by teachers, to not work so hard. Then I realised, even as I give myself a realistic time frame of (full) recovery (one year), I now have to work harder, race against time because it is in these early days that everything can easily be lost.
It's Chinese New Year... I thought of, foot binding. It's not the binding that breaks and re-moulds the feet. The bindings may place the feet in a desired shape, but the little girl has to then walk on her bound feet repeatedly in order to crush the bones of her feet. Her flesh will die, her muscles will shrink, she will possibly even suffer gangrene.
What is a broken arm compared to that little girl's fate?
The only way forward, is to forcefully push my arm to 90 degrees, using his strength, lean into that pain.
At some point, the pain becomes a hum. I have to just hang in that hum, breathe, and then repeat the exercises again and again.
4. No Pain, No Gain
And then I force my arm to dance. My objective is to not be afraid of moving an unyielding arm, and to move with the pain.
I am trying to remind my left arm what it feels like to bend. That's all we got today.
Bend, rotate, unfold, backwards,
and in reverse.
The arm needs to remember it's attached to the torso. It needs to remember, motion, speed, strength, flight.
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