Traction 2006 October 19 23:07
Posted by diamond in : Health , 3 commentsI’m now up to 19 minutes with 40kg of tension at the physio’s (up from 30kg and 34kg of the previous visits). It’s a rather interesting experience. As the machine applies the pressure, you slide down the table a bit until the harness across your chest begins to restrain you. Then, as the pressure increases, every time you breath out you’ll slide a tiny bit more. Eventually it reaches a stable point where you can only take shallow breaths as your ribs are being compressed. It’s fine as you’re not doing anything more exerting than lying there, but did make me somewhat nervous the first time. Also, forgetting to remove my leatherman from my belt was a bad move. The straps around my waist ensured i had a rather unusually shaped bruise on my hip where my leatherman lives. Still, the experience is generally quite benign, and along with the various stretches i’ve been given to do, seems to be helping my back recover. The stretches take about 35 minutes, and the physio has told me to try do them twice a day if possible. I suspect that’s mostly in the im-possible category, but we’ll see how it works out.