Easy Acupuncture for CT

Posts Tagged ‘Limping’

A lot of my patients and friends ask me, “Chris, how did you get into acupuncture?” It is a bit of a long story but bear with me on this.

It starts in college in 1988.

I was a rock climber in college. In fact, I was obsessed with it. Living in New Paltz New York I had access to one of the best climbing areas on the East Coast: the Shawangunk Escarpment in the Hudson Valley.

During any free time that I had between classes or on any summer day, you could find me at the cliffs climbing.

I was pretty good too.

Anyway, one day I was at the “Gunks” with my buddy Tom doing some “bouldering” (aka practice climbs) Basically these are climbs that are low (low being a relative term…) to the ground so you can work on your skills and strength. You don’t wear a harness or ropes as with regular climbing.

I was working on a particular “bouldering” problem that was about 16 feet off the ground and involved a strenuous traverse of about thirty feet. It really required a lot of arm and hand strength. About three quarters of the way my forearms were just totally blown out. I literally had no strength left to hold on.

I yelled down to my buddy to let him know that I was going to pop off the rock so that he could spot me (keep me from falling backwards as I landed).

Keep in mind I was 16 feet up in the air. The bottoms of my feet were about 10 feet from the ground when I let go.

Have you ever jump out of a second story window?? On to cement? In bare feet?

Well what I did was near the equivalent. I hit the ground…hard. In very thin climbing shoes.

Tom stopped me from falling backwards but man I did the bottom of my right foot sting!! It stung for a while but I was able to walk it off. My foot remained sore for a few days but then the pain faded and I didn’t give it much thought.

A year went by.

I started to notice that I couldn’t walk without pain in my right foot. It got progressively worse. When it finally got unbearable I went to see the podiatrist.

It wasn’t good news.

I had shattered a very small bone in my foot called a sesamoid bone.

It’s just a small bone suspended with in a tendon. It’s like a kneecap but on the bottom of the ball of your foot. You are supposed to have two, a small one and a large one. I now had four because I had broken the large one in to three pieces.

Worse yet, the bone became necrotic, (a fancy Latin term for “dead”). It created an inflammation in my First Metatarsal Phalangeal Joint. (Another fancy term for the “ball of the foot”.)

In short I had a degenerative arthritis in my right foot and it was causing me to limp a lot.

Now I am an active guy. I like to hike, backpack and be out in nature. Generally I like to use my feet… with out pain!

The doctor told me I had two options. I could get surgery and they could remove the “dead” bone and clean up the joint. Best yet my insurance would pay for the surgery! Great!

The other option was to get an orthotic insert for my shoes. Much cheaper, less invasive than surgery but not covered by my insurance! Figures… (Plus I wouldn’t be able to wear my favorite Teva sandals in the summer…)

Well, at the time I didn’t have the money for the orthotics. The surgical option, my doctor told me, had a 50% chance eliminating the pain or it could make my pain worse!

I did the only rational thing given two crappy options…

I did nothing.

The pain got worse.

At this point, I was in grad school in Albany NY and working as a part-time as cartographer (fancy term for” map maker”) for New York State. My boss Greg, who was a fairly cool guy, was asking me about my limp one day. It was one of those days when the foot was hurting a lot. I told him about the fall and the resulting arthritis.

He suggested Acupuncture.

Now, I will freely admit, I was pretty open minded about acupuncture. Unlike a lot of my Acupuncturist friends that had to be converted from being full-blown skeptics.

“What the hell”, I thought, “lets give it a try.

So I made the appointment.

And my life changed.

I won’t get into all the details of the treatment, but here is what happened in a nutshell. I had exactly two treatments in two weeks.

My pain was gone!

Not just reduced, not just mostly gone, I mean gone completely!

It stayed that way for 8 months.

The pain came back, but not nearly as bad. An additional treatment took care of that and I was good for another long stretch.

I was back to my old self and best yet could wear my Teva’s in the summer!

It also planted a seed in my mind.

After I had finished grad school at Albany my part-time job with New York State turned into a full time job.  I was stuck behind a computer all day.

I was not loving life.

Then someone handed me the morning paper and there was an article about acupuncture and its effectiveness in treating pain.

Something clicked in the back of my brain.

I thought to myself, “you know, I would be really good at acupuncture”.

The rest, as they say, is history. I found my self in acupuncture school 2 years after completing my masters degree at SUNY Albany.

It is hard to believe that was 13 years ago!

What’s your Acupuncture story?? I would love to hear it!