Getting unscrewed

Last Thursday, I had the pleasure of getting unscrewed. I’m not making a joke. I’m actually being quite literal.

A couple years back, I needed surgery on my broken right arm. There was a crack between the shaft of my upper arm bone and the lateral epicondyle – the bump on the outside of the bone, just above the elbow joint. Muscles of my forearm attach there and their constant activation was interfering with healing. Indeed, there was a danger that the bone wouldn’t heal, that there would be “non-union,” leaving my elbow easily susceptible to irreparable injury and my arm, which I kinda need for my work, weak.

The remedy was to attach the errant condyle back to its base by means of two screws. That surgery went well, though the effects of the anesthesiology were to later prove quite debilitating.

Somehow, one of the screw heads was not flush with the bone. It stuck out enough to irritate the tendon every time I turned my forearm a certain way or reached for something. In the past six months, straightening and bending my arm started to be creaky and feel increasingly limited. Each time the tendon popped over the screw I could feel my arm cringe ever so slightly. Since there was nothing wrong with the actual elbow itself, my guarding, my continuing to cringe by ever so slightly and constantly contracting my forearm, hand, and arm muscles, had to be the reason my arm still couldn’t straighten fully.

This kind of constant isometric (active and static – that is to say, non-lengthening) contracting is one of the most insidious aspects of the body’s automatic and instantaneous response to trauma. The muscles responding to the discomfort don’t contract alone – the muscles that work along aside it (the agonists) and the muscles that counteract it (the antagonists) are also called into action. It’s this constant low grade self-protecting contracting that begins to impede effortlessly turning intention into action and often starts to unravel the patterns of coordination built over a lifetime.

Though I continued to do ATM and to get FIs, the constant irritation proved too great a foe for a functional solution. No matter what I did, the cringing returned. Thanks to my personal practice, I could undo the tightening and, therefore, didn’t get habituated to the increased resting tonus of my right arm. Definitely one of those moments when awareness turns out to be more annoying than peaceful. What’s worse, counteracting the consequences of the structural problem proved exhausting and, ultimately ineffective. As time went on I could sense how the way I brought the fork to my mouth or the reached for the doorknob was starting to change. My action was becoming halting. I could tell my hand was taking more and more round about ways. The uncomfortable pop – cringe – hesitate – avoid cycle was unstoppable and was taking a cumulative toll.

Though I’m no fan of surgery, I was looking forward to this procedure. Once we’d set the date for the operation, I could hardly wait.

Soon after I returned home, I realized immediately that I didn’t feel anywhere near as . . . beat up—as sore, achy, rough around the edges—as I did with the first surgery. During the operation, my surgeon discovered the physical basis for my sensation: bone had built up, growing over one of the screw heads. He also found a small fragment of unmended bone floating in the joint, which could have also been part of the problem and that he removed. All said and done, it turns out that getting unscrewed was much easier than getting screwed. Who knew?

Anyway, my quiet 4th of July weekend at home gave me opportunity to think back to when I broke my arm. There I was in Melbourne, Australia, in January 2012, about to start to teaching an advanced training with a bum knee and two – yes, two – broken arms. A major aspect of the five-day course was me teaching intensive, detailed, hands-on technique each day.

How to was I going to teach technique if I could not demonstrate?

Luckily, I’d already been thinking about that question. After all, if we say when teaching ATM that imitation is the poorest form of learning, how can we teach the most delicate and intimate aspect of our work through demonstrations? As it happened, teaching this course was a turning point for me, one that I’ve already written a blog about. That experience galvanized what I’d been learning, deepened my questions about how we could continue to develop the Feldenkrais Method of sensory-motor learning, and helped me recognize the importance of learning together . . . More on that next time.