The World is Changing

I had to go to a physical therapist yesterday because of a bursa on my heel. I had been depressed for sometime about it because I had been in constant varying stages of pain for about 4 months now. I am sort of a caveman in that I need physical excercise to stay alive and am used to walking in the forest or riding my bicycle with my dogs almost every day. So this new situation that prevents my walking every day has been very troubling for me at age 61. At a younger age I might have been able to take it more in stride but this illness I see at this age as very serious because I can't correct this successfully with an operation.

Anyway, yesterday I went to a new physical therapist and was very depressed about the whole thing. I took my wife along because it is difficult for me to retain enough information if I'm in pain. I can drive a car or motorcycle with pain but find it more difficult to retain verbal information especially medical information if I'm in pain. I seem to lose about 80% of it because I'm trying to push away the pain mentally.

Anyway, I soon learned that physical therapy would help me somewhat. The most interesting things to me were the "cold lasers" shot into the bursa on my heel to simulate "as the physical therapist said" what happens if a tiger makes deep cuts with its claws in a human. He said that there are triggers when raw flesh is exposed to sunlight that causes a very quick healing response to take place and that he can trick my bursa to heal in this way by shining cold lasers directly into the bursa to trick the flesh to go into emergency mode and to heal itself.

I found out that a bursa is not like a rupture on my foot but it is too thick of scar tissue from too many injuries in the past during my life and that shining the cold laser into it forces it to heal itself rather than to just get into a vicious cycle of pain and swelling. Also, he attached electrodes to my foot and leg and showed me a biofeedback device with little lights and sounds. He told me to make the lights and sounds go up to a certain level with my mind and then let it go back to zero. I was able to see that there were many rogue signals from my mind going off because of the injury. As I used the biofeedback mechanism I found I could eliminate them because they weren't useful. When I returned home I noticed I was completely pain free for the evening. Yes. The world is changing in what is possible every day.