Hey unknown....take that!

Well, the dahlias survive and so, today, do I.

Yesterday helped me reach this end on this occasion. Wednesdays have become the weekly du jour for my 7 a.m. physical therapy across town at Longwood Medical.

Ian, my PT, rocks.

Not a fan of rising at 5:30 to see him. Not a fan of having (as of last week) drained my annual Flexible Spending Account on his co-pays. And he's a golf-swing specialist, go figure.

But Ian came recommended to me by an über-runner. (Young Scientist, natch, treated successfully for knee-popping.) He has sent my hip bursitis on hiatus and spent 3 months teaching me to teach my body not to hurt itself anymore.

This is a physical therapist's job and Ian is just doing it.

Nonetheless, his combination of knowledge and temperament is singular. At my evaluation in May, within 10 minutes, with a shrug of his shoulders, he diagnosed the nebulous groin pain that had been plaguing me for 6 weeks. I can still recall my relief at how matter-of-fact he was:

"Yup, bursitis in your hip. Here's this stretch. And this stretch. And then we'll strengthen your core. And you're not going to run for a few weeks but then you can. And if none of this works, we will try something else."

As in, quit your stressing. Quit your whining. We'll fix this.

Ian is mellow (the office music selection recently has been The Coffee House satellite) but doesn't baby me. He doesn't get angry when I whine, but he doesn't take it either. If I say my something hurts, he says, "I know why it hurts," and then tells me why and how to counter it.

So I've griped for weeks about my left ankle and right knee. You've heard about it, Ian has heard about it. Together we determined nothing is torn and nothing is broken and nothing is swollen. I've rather stopped agonizing and, when running, practice my best "mind-over-distraction" mantra.

But yesterday was a watershed. I think Ian was tired of listening to me gripe. He thusly ran me through a battery of standing and balancing positions, then exclaimed:

"So you see how you have very little flexibility in a squat? That means your calf muscles are super tight. Which throws your running stride off which then manifests in your joints elsewhere. When you told me where these pains were I thought, yes, I think it's the calf muscles and how you perform a squat confirms it. Stretch those babies out!"

And with that he gave me 3 new stretches and modified 4 others to make them more appropriate for this issue. One weight-bearing twisting lunge thing was taxing, enough that I yelled out how strenuous it was. He just as quickly responded: "What did you think it was supposed to be?!"

Could have kissed him.

I know I'm making Ian out to be a god when he is not. (We swapped oversleeping stories yesterday. He's human.) I can't tell you if my knees and ankles will never hurt again.

But he has cured me of my tendencies to think that every twinge is a torn ligament, making that particular unknown (leg pain) a known ... and by getting rid of just one in a life currently overflowing with unknowns .... and by working so assiduously to help me run comfortably again ... he helps me make it possible to go on.