I Hurt My Back At A Concert. How Do I Recover?

All right, so let’s start. I’m just gonna go a little bit more into Katie’s story. Katie was at one of those outdoor concerts with some kids. Some family like cousins and other things. The kids were getting a little bored because the concert was actually a little bit away. They weren’t right next to everything and which is easy for them to get distracted. As a way to engage them a little bit more in what was happening, she had them on her back.

She has their arms up around her shoulders. Legs are wrapped around her waist and she’s just having a good time bopping around enjoying life. From her perspective, she realizes looking back, it was a long time that she was bouncing around with kids, but at the time it didn’t feel like it was that long.

She didn’t really notice anything dramatic while she was doing anything. So she didn’t think anything of just standing there with this kid on her back, till the next day. The next day, it’s her Sunday, she woke up and she could not move. Her back was so tight and so stiff. It was just grabbing her every time she took a deep breath, it was just a lot of pain. She milled around her house all day,

She really tried not to move too much. 

Come Monday when she was talking to me, she was still having quite a bit of pain and she wanted to know how to get rid of that. Obviously as quickly as possible, she also wasn’t sure as she needed to go to the doctor, she had a whole lot of questions. So I talked to her for a little bit to find out a little bit more. 

She didn’t have any signs that said that she had done any damage to herself. So we just made an appointment for her to come in. I was able to get her in pretty quickly. When I got to look at her back, she just had a massive muscle spasm. After she was able to fully show me what it was that she was doing with the kid, by the way that she was demonstrating things that while she had the kids on her back, her lower back muscles were holding up, not only her body, but also the added weight of those kids. That extra stress caused her low back to become very, very tired. Then it hit a muscle spasm. 

It just created a huge muscle spasm and her lower back was just locked in and it was not giving up easily. So we were able to calm all that down, thankfully with some manual technique,  I was able to do massage and some hands on techniques to help calm that down and break that cycle of  just spazzing.

Every time she moved, every time she took a deep breath, she would just get this horrible, sharp pain. I talked about things that she can do at home, such as. I showed her some gentle stretches that she can do. I told her to ice. She was like, are you sure? I feel like I’m supposed to heat and that’s what I did. It gave me a little bit of relief. Heat does help sometimes with muscle spasms. So by all means you could certainly try, but in the case that she’s describing it, this muscle was overused.

It’s just like any workout. If you get back from running really far your legs hurt, I’m not gonna have you put heat on there, because you’re just gonna bring more blood flow to the area. There’s plenty of blood flow there. We just need it to calm down. We need that tissue to calm down and that’s really where ice does the best work. So icing for 5, 10 minutes, whatever you can handle. Oftentimes especially if the area’s already inflamed ice actually feels pretty good. As long as you can get over the idea that it’s ice, because as Houstonians, we don’t like cold things. 

She was able to do that, able to ice and it really did calm things down. She was able to move a little bit more freely, especially after she did some of the stretches that we talked about.

Now as she’s been coming back, one might ask, why does she need therapy if the pain went away? That is a hundred percent true, but minus the fact that the kids were a little bit heavy, she should have been able to tolerate the motion that she was doing without having the severity of the reaction. And after watching how she moved, I discovered some other things that were going on that led to that injury. That’s what we’re working on. We’re working on her hip strength and some overall core stability so that she doesn’t have this happen in the future.

Not that I think she’ll be carrying kids on her back, but this same type of injury happens to people all the time, just picking random things up or holding things or in some cases sweeping. We’re just working on the overall mechanics so that she doesn’t have this type of thing happen again. Nothing worse than waking up and not feeling like you can take a deep breath without sharp shooting pain. This very scary moment in everybody’s life, anybody who’s had it at least. 

So I hope that Katie’s story helps calm some anxiety. If you are suffering from this right now, completely there’s help. You don’t necessarily have to go to a primary care office or orthopedics office. You can come and get physical therapy and feel better when you leave the office. Because we’ll be able to look at exactly what’s going on with your tissue, calm the tissue down and help that healing process start the day you come. Wouldn’t that be nice, not waiting two weeks to get an x-ray or an MRI report back before anybody will offer you any kind of care.

I hope that this information is very helpful. If you are looking for this type of care right now, I will leave a link for a way for us to call you. You can certainly call us, but if you would like us to call you. We have a form that you fill out. That way we don’t just randomly call you in the middle of your day and interrupt your day. There are specific times that we’ll ask like, what times work best for you.  

Or if all this sounds way too good to be true and you really wanna come in and talk to us in person to make sure that we are what we say we are. I will leave a link for a discovery visit. Now a discovery visit is free. It is 20 minutes and it’s where we get to talk for the 20 minutes about what’s going on with you and do a short movement assessment. Seeing how you’re moving in space and making sure that I really can help you get back to the things that you want to get back to. 

I hope that this information is helpful and that you’re having a wonderful day. Bye!