A Promise is a Promise

Alright, so I promised I would give an update on what all happened with that weird ER visit I alluded to in my last post. Since that happened two weeks or so ago, the world feels topsy-turvy. We have since found out what was wrong after visiting four different doctors not including the ER doctor who was, in fact, useless. That whole trip just provided us with first hand knowledge about how terrible our healthcare really is. It needs some help…

Unfortunately, none of the doctors except the chiropractor even had a remote clue as to what was wrong. We ended up doing our own research, along with the chiropractor helping and taking into account some things his physical therapist mentioned (thoracic extension, or lack thereof), and we have found this: When he was in high school he had a basketball injury where he stuck out his arm in front of the guy with the ball, but the guy with the ball was running full speed, so it spun Casey (the boyfriend) around and tweaked his back to the point where he had to limp off the court. That was the day, 8ish years ago, that he started going to the chiropractor. She helped some, but he also tried acupuncture as well and after going several times and feeling moderately better, he thinks he just learned to live with it and started thinking it was the normal way to feel. Turns out, that hit had messed up his whole body.

His rib cage was shifted, affecting everything.  His thoracic extension was all messed up and he didn’t know why, we know now that his injury shifted his body and over extended his body so that any extra stretch he did would result in a muscle spasm. This lead to bad posture and developing the wrong muscles in his core. I don’t know what order this all happened, but it all happened at some point these in these 8 years. Come to find out, one of his ab muscles had been compensating for the other and became attached to his sternum some how and the night that I took him to the ER, he had been stretching, and it caused a severe muscle spasm that pulled his sternum farther down and to the left. This resulted in nerve issues and a huge difference in breathing capabilities. Because he was so upset that he suddenly lost all the good feelings that he had been slowly getting back by doing proper exercises, it had aggravated it so much more that it made everything worse.

Thus the ER visit. The best resource he found is this article The Scapula and Thoracic Spine: A Classic Love Story To Improve Your Overhead. It explains how he went wrong to being with, in general terms, and then breaks down exactly how to fix that weird place in your body that the average person just doesn’t think about. Go figure, breathing correctly is the key to a healthy life!

In the conclusion, he is improving more every day but it is a journey all the same. Please, dear readers, keep him in your thoughts even if it’s just a second and send good vibes and JuJu his way!