Okay, it’s been officially three weeks since my fall on the ice, and I think it’s safe to say that this episode is resolving without turning into the dramatic re-injury that I feared.
It is more a blip on the radar– the kind of setback I had from time to time for years while trying to recover from my first injury– than its own new injury.
I did see my chiropractor once about two weeks after the fall, because the joint had locked up in a way that I was unfamiliar with. (This led me to conclude that there can be delayed consequences to sprains of the SI joint ligaments).
Luckily, my chiropractor explained that, contrary to what I had feared, the joint was not locked up in any kind of bizarre new way. It was still locked due to the posterior (backwards) rotation of the ilium, which I consider to be good news, because I am able to fix that type of rotation with self-adjustments using the muscle energy technique.
The difference is that the place where the joint was locked was, indeed, in the place where I had been feeling pain after my fall, lower down in the joint than I normally do. That is basically the part of my butt that I landed on when I fell.
My chiropractor agreed with me that I had probably sprained the ligaments in that exact area, and now they are stretched out, which is what’s allowing the joint to lock up.
***
As I have learned the hard way, the right chiropractor can be great to diagnose what’s going on in the SI joints, but having too many adjustments can actually be destabilizing to the area over time.
Looking back, I now know that a large part of the reason I struggled with SI joint dysfunction for five years was that I was going to the chiropractor too much, and not giving that part of my body a chance to settle.
However, I do have a lot of respect for (some) chiropractors’ ability to diagnose (more later on what makes a good chiropractor).
That is why I went back to my chiropractor for this– more for the diagnosis than for the adjustment, actually.
I did let her adjust me once, but now that I understand what’s going on in the joint, and that it’s not really different from the type of problem I had before, I have returned to doing my self-adjustments and pool exercises, and am waiting to see if my body can just even things out.
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So far it seems to be working. My joints haven’t actually locked up badly, in a way that is anything like the way they used to lock up to the point of being immobile after my first injury.
So, my instincts tell me this is going to resolve itself. In fact, it mostly already has, and I haven’t really felt myself limited in what I want to do day to day, even if I can still feel slightly more pain in the area.
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So, that’s all for now! Let me know if you have any questions.
My Sacroiliac Joint Saga 