Interesting Injuries

Is your strange injury unique?  The pain of an injury is never funny, but over the years we’ve had many patients struggle to tell us how the injury occurred because they were laughing too much.

Here are a few of the ones the patient thought was funny:

• • –   Ankle strain from slipping on a puddle of chocolate.
  • –   Tukey back. Every year at least one patient has come to us after Christmas hanging their head in shame at having lifted the turkey out of the oven and strained their back.
  • –   Cruciate ligament injury (knee pain) after being butted by a randy ram.
  • –   Shoulder strain from being tugged by a horse that ran backwards because he didn’t want to be caught.
  • –   On the theme of horse riding: shoulder injury from shovelling horse poo for hours on end.
  • –   Various back pains from nocturnal aerobics….!
  • –   Falling over the dog

The really exciting thing about these injuries is that it doesn’t matter what caused them.  Do you think your body knows that the ankle sprain was caused by chocolate, not rugby?  Or that the shoulder pain was from mucking out rather than a HIIT session?  Do you think it cares?  Of course not!

It’s helpful for us to know what happened so that we can piece together the mechanism of the injury, but if you didn’t want to tell us how it happened we’d still be able to find a way to put you back together.

Whatever weird ways you’ve injured yourself, it doesn’t matter.  A strain is a strain – our treatment and rehab will depend on your own personal circumstances, not on how you caused the problem.

For example: imagine, you’re going to run a marathon and you damage your knee, it won’t matter to us whether you hurt the knee falling off a kerb or falling off a tightrope.  What will matter is how fit you are, how committed you are to doing your rehab and where you are in your training.  If you’re not doing any fitness training and have a serious work deadline approaching we might pace the rehab differently so you don’t get in a tizz about trying to complete the project and squeeze rehab into your day too.

Of course if you injured yourself in a complicated nocturnal aerobics move we might suggest that you refrain from repeating it for a few weeks!