What exactly is an adhesion in reference to your ribcage and muscles?
The way it’s been described to me, is that it’s like fibrous scar tissue under my skin. Adhesions tend to mean that damaged tissue has sort of stuck together, which decreases the muscle function, and weakens its ability to contract and move like it ought.
So I don’t just have knots in my muscle, my muscles are sort of... fused together I guess. And any time I try to stretch or do the exercises my doctor was so adamant I needed to do to decrease my pain, I was just repeatedly tearing the muscles, which caused more adhesions, which caused more inflammation, which causes more pain...and round and round we go. They’re also extremely painful to break up. Massages are not relaxing things for me in this regard. It often feels like more pain than gain, but I know it’s not true.
He actually found one that ran the full length of my neck that I thought was just a really sore tendon. (I was in a car accident 10 years ago, it now looks like I had whiplash that needed treatment of some kind, but I never got any because, well, if you’ve read my other medical posts you can guess.)
You find people who have surgery develop it during healing sometimes, as it’s how the body seals off injured areas, except I’ve never had major surgery. My body has just been shredding itself apart trying to follow the advice of doctors who were convinced all my pain was caused purely be depression. Turns out, not so much.
