On a personal note, I went to see a physical therapist yesterday. Maybe I haven’t complained about my right hip so much in this blog, but I’ve had a problem with it just about all my adult life. It starts hurting when I do long walks, and when it gets really bad my knees and back start aching as well. I saw a specialist about 15 years ago and the explanation I got boils down to that I have a structural problem in the hip joint. It’s not severe enough to require an operation but since it’s a problem in the skeleton, there’s no cure either. The pain thus explained, I learned to live with it. It never stopped me from doing anything I wanted to do, and I accepted that the longer my hike is, the more it will hurt afterwards. But the next day, it was all good again, so I didn’t have a reason to worry about it.

But the older I got, the more I started wondering how this problem would affect me in my retirement years. So I saw a doctor a couple of years and lo and behold, he told me that I didn’t have any problems with the hip! All the while he couldn’t tell me where the pain comes from (must be my imagination, then). He did recommend me to see a physical therapist though, which I did, but he didn’t tell me anything that would help me either so I once again accepted the pain.

But then last autumn I noticed that my right knee was hurting more than it ever did before. At first I thought I had injured it on a hike I did in September but when the sharpest pain went over, I kind of started ignoring it. After all, I’m used to having these aches. Then some time after Christmas, I started to work standing up, and I had a revelation – standing long periods on level ground I found that it felt like I was tilting to the right! That’s when it dawned on me that maybe, just maybe, this problem with the hip and the knee was the result of my right leg being shorter than the left! One of my colleagues recommended a physical therapist in Järvsö so I picked up the phone and booked a time.

So I saw this PT yesterday. Forget the doctors, they don’t have a clue, even if the last doctor was right in the the hip was ok (his big failure was not being able to figure the reason I complained about the hip). But this PT, he’s a genius! I didn’t have to tell him where it hurt. He just knew it, and the real kicker of this whole thing is that the length difference in my legs causes all the problems I’ve been having all the way from my toes up to my head! My body is constantly rotated and in bad position, which causes upper body tension which gives me frequently aching shoulders which in turn gives me a headache. When walking or hiking, the hip takes the biggest punishment which explains why it’s always the first place to hurt, and and the knee and my back are quick to follow. What I thought was the cause of all the other pains, is actually only the first symptom. And there’s more to it… because my feet hit the ground in an unnatural position when I walk, it means that my toes are sore after a long hike. And it’s no wonder that I don’t like carrying a heavy backpack, because every extra kilo on my back just makes the problem so much worse!

Because the problem has been going for all my adult life, it can’t be fixed overnight. The first step is to use special insoles with a raised heel for my right foot, which stops the tilt and helps me maintain a good posture. The second step is to restore strength in my upper body so I get my shoulders in shape, it means that I have to use poles when I walk. Not the coolest thing ever, but heck, if I can get rid of these headaches I’ll suffer the indignity. I woke up early this morning because my head was hurting, and pain killers don’t even make a dent in it.

One funny thing though. When I told the PT that I do a lot of hiking in the mountains, he didn’t understand how it’s been possible because with the kind of problem I have, it should hurt all too much to go up and down the mountains. It’s called sisu, I told him!

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The picture has nothing to do with this story, I just realised that I only posted this on Facebook two weeks ago. It was a weird and unusual phenomenon, I had never seen it happening before. It had snowed in the morning hours and during the day the temperature got just above freezing, meaning that the snow was sticky. In the afternoon the wind started blowing really hard, I had trouble standing still when I took the pictures. But with this loose and sticky snow, the wind picked it up and started rolling it so that the field was covered with snowballs! Or as in this case, a perfect snow cone. The next morning almost all of the snowballs were gone; with the temperature dipping below zero, there was no more snowball effect and wind just broke off the snowballs it had created before.