YOU CHICKEN!

I have bursitis!! What is that you might ask? It's an inflamed bursal sac. A bursal sac is a sac filled with fluid that acts to lubricate and reduce the friction between two surfaces in the body. There are hundreds of them in the body but the one that occurs between my Achilles and my heel bone, right at the back of my foot, is the one that I've been having trouble with. How can I put this nicely?....It HURTS like HELL! And when you jump for a living, that's sort of a problem!!

I've been struggling with this now for the past 6 to 7 weeks and it has progressively gotten worse. I've been getting treatment every day - ice, ultra sound, massage, ibuprofen, stretching, I even took 7 days off running/jumping to see if the rest would help. It did, only minimally. So this past Saturday, when my pain was literally a 15 on a scale of 1-10, with my options running out, I finally decided to get acupuncture.

I did some research online and then just jumped in my car and drove to this office that I found. Of course, the office I went to was closed. I am not a big fan of needles but since I was desperate, I decided to continue my quest and limp down the street a couple blocks.

Luckily I found another acupuncture office a few buildings down. This old Chinese guy came out and before I knew it, I was face down getting needles stuck everywhere. Everything was fine ie. not too painful, until he stuck the one needle directly down into the back of my heel a good 2-3 inches deep. I SCREAMED LIKE A (insert whatever is the worst noise you can imagine, lol) and for a moment, I worried that all of his other patients might run for their lives out of his office. Guess what he said to me? "You chicken!" Really though??? Was that necessary, lol? I wanna see him try it on himself and smile and laugh about it! Anyway...

It's now, 3 sessions and 5 days later and my pain and inflammation has amazingly gone from that 15 down to about a 1!! Why didn't I do this sooner??? I've been banned from running/jumping again for another 7-10 days. It's really hard to adhere to this since my foot feels soooo much better but I don't want to re-aggravate anything so I'm being a good patient and trying my best to keep still. I PRAY that this works because otherwise, I'm not sure what else to do....

In the meantime, I've been talking to Kenta a lot about technique, etc and lifting, doing core work and watching video footage of jump after jump after jump. Might as well make the best of this involuntary time off.

The one place I feel right at home is on the runway and this only me makes me appreciate that even more. I cannot wait to get back "home" next week.