Normal Is Wonderful...

For the moment, my butt is in place.

Butt bootcamp went off without a hitch over the course of the latter half of January and all of February. I came away feeling stronger and more fit, which was a good feeling. I also came away feeling awesome, as I had declared myself as such early in the program.

Sportsmetrics involves plyometrics, which is a highly technical term for jumping. It's aimed at female soccer players--high schoolers in this case--for ACL injury prevention. I was a bit of an odd (wo)man out, having been out of high school for a few years, and being there to try to stabilize my butt instead of my knee, but whatever. Hanging out with high school girls made me miss all the great parts about teaching in my previous life. And after I declared myself awesome, they kept calling me awesome. Which was awesome.

Since the end of Sportsmetrics, I've been back for 2 follow-up visits so that the PT could try to whack my sacrum back into place, as it had been out for several months. No dice the first time, but finally, today, she did it. Now, anyone out there in the manual therapy related fields, if you ever want a case study, lemme know because I have it on high authority that I have one seriously stubborn sacrum. And anyone in the Cheyenne area who needs some PT, also lemme know because I can give you names and numbers...these guys are good, I tell you.

My problem seems to be whatever ligament it is back there. Sacro-tuberis? Something like that. The running theory is that, way back in high school softball when I dove backward (more or less) to catch a fly ball and threw it out of whack initially, the ligament loosened enough to make it really difficult for the SI joint to remain stable. On top of this, it took 9 years before the root problem was diagnosed (my main symptom is headaches--not so easy to deduce that my butt would cause them), so that was frustrating. And it seems I have joints which, to begin with, are on the loose end of normal, which isn't necessarily a problem, but throw in a trauma such as a fall and things can get a little hinky. And you can't just up & re-tighten a ligament. In my case the best option seems to be to compensate for the loosy-goosy ligament with muscle strength; hence my myriad exercises and semi-obsession with all things core strength.

Things were good for a while with this approach, but ever since I started having kids it hasn't been the same. It could be that the hormones of pregnancy and nursing (of which I've been doing one or the other constantly for the past 4 years) are keeping my joints just loose enough that the sacrum flops about all willy-nilly. I'm actually hoping that this is the case, because even though it means no certain end to the problem for a while, it also means that there will be an end. The scarier thought is having to consider other medical options involving needles and such, which I would consider, but only as a last resort and I'd have to think long and hard about them.

So I'm not sure how much hope to hold out that my sacrum will hold out. If it follows recent patterns, in 2 weeks it will slip at some random moment as I'm sitting down to use the bathroom or something. This would be frustrating, but not surprising. If you are a praying sort of person, please pray for me and my butt.

In the meantime though, I'm trying hard to keep perspective on the situation and enjoy the relief while I have it. If you hear me murmuring about how good my butt feels, bear with me because it really does feel wonderful when it feels normal.

Aaaaaaaaaahhhhh...