No Butts About it, Old Injuries Die Hard

I haven’t rollerbladed in about ten years. It has been while since I’ve needed to engage my balancing skills beyond yoga poses or cycling. I plan to start skiing this fall, so I saw rollerblading as a good cross-training opportunity…at the time.

I was roller blading along Alkai Beach in West Seattle a few weeks ago when a stocky, excited dog jumped across the trail right in front of me. Instantly I was on my ass, having landed on my tailbone. It really hurt. I have never enjoyed hitting the pavement, and at my age of 57, that remains even more true; it’s not as “soft” as I remember. Ugggh! So not cool. 

Over the next week, I noticed my opposite hip muscles tighten up. My daily yoga was not stemming the tide of building tension. I visited my friend Carol Kakoczky, an experienced Craniosacral Therapist of many years in Issaquah, WA. She does similar work to me, and it took us a good hour to release the kinetic energy that had lodged in my tailbone. I felt so much better afterwards. Then a week later, I felt like I needed a follow-up session. My tailbone and hip have been feeling so much better since then.  It’s nice to have my butt back. Thanks Carol!

As a massage therapist, I’ve been working with trauma injuries for many years - I’ve treated a great many clients with it, and I’ve been treated myself. It is a simple truth that many of our falls, accidents and surgeries contribute to trauma to our bodies. 

In my world, bodies deserve hands-on respect, attention, and care after a fall or surgery. It is one of the greatest fallacies to think that just because we don’t fracture a bone in a fall, we are alright. Maybe we are, but maybe not. What if our fall was just shy of a resulting fracture? If there was not quite enough force to cause a fracture, what about all that force (energy) from the fall? That’s a lot of kinetic energy now in the body. If it was a decent fall with reasonable force to it, chances are we will feel it at some point in the future. Treating such an injury early on can save us from pain and discomfort later. 

A fall on the tailbone can contribute to concussion, result in back pain, lead to headaches, create leg or foot pain. You never know how the body will compensate for a fall/ trauma; there are so many variables. 

The big surprise is that a fall like mine, if left unattended, might lie seemingly dormant for weeks, months or years. Then one day we wake with pain seemingly out of the blue. You ignore it at first. Once forced to confront the pain, it you give it all kinds of attention and treatment, but to no avail. Sometimes, the source of pain and tension is coming from a distant corner of the body, from an event long forgotten in your history. 

Here’s an example. In my senior year of college I was hit by a car while running. It was a substantial hit. The impact threw me into the windshield. My face, head and neck smashed into the glass and many shards ended up in my face and neck. At the time, getting hit didn’t seem like such a big deal. I was 21 years old and felt indestructible.  After a few days in the hospital I was back on my feet, and returned to running within two weeks. However, decades later, I needed treatment for that long-ago accident, to treat the face, head, back and neck pain that had surfaced, as well as emotional pain that were never addressed or known about at the time. 

I so grateful to the practitioners who had the skill and knowledge to help me navigate my healing and full recovery. I am thankful that I can now offer such support to others in need of similar treatment and care.

It is a gift that such injuries can still be treated, otherwise, I’d be feeling decades older than I actually am, given my colorful history of sports injuries, falls, and accidents.

If you are interested in reading up on this topic of how trauma gets stored in our body and can influence our behavior, here are a couple of titles: “The Body Keeps Score” by Besel Van der Kolk, “The Body Remembers” by Babette Rothschild and Peter Levine’s “Waking the Tiger.”