Hi beautiful community, I'm a fairly new member (joined a couple months back) and I love the supportive network here. I have never posted before but I'm really struggling today and thought I'd reach out. I'm curious if others have had a similar experience to mine. I always knew I was a little extra bendy, but hadn't really had issues with it until last year when my lower back began to spasm and get very tight. I'd always had more tightness on my right side (I'm more hypermobile on the right), and normally it does settle down, but last summer I was hit with a cascade of things. First, I got a fascia release treatment that was very aggressive and caused excruciating pain, and I was hardly able to walk for a week. A few weeks later things were calming down and I was regaining mobility and strength, but was then hit hard with COVID and a bad shoulder injury in the same week. Oof. The injury developed into a frozen shoulder, and COVID turned into long COVID, and came in flares every couple weeks that brought horrible joint pain and exhaustion. I'd never really had joint pain before this, despite being hypermobile, but it was just awful especially in my knees, hands and wrists. COVID seems to have brought issues to the surface for me, and after months of testing, I'm in the diagnostic process for hEDS/HSD now. The process of recovery has been so up and down for the last 6 months - I start regaining strength and then get hit with another flare-up and have to rebuild again, and it's exhausting and discouraging. I have indeed noticed change if I take a long view of things: after a ton of daily effort, my shoulder has mostly healed, and I am also much stronger than I was in the fall. I can hold my center much more easily since starting TZC classes, and I now see that the spasm in my back is a bracing pattern that I've had for many years. Some days I feel good about that, but others (like today) I feel like I still have so far to go and I'm so far from where I was, and it makes me very overwhelmed. I know taking it slow is the right approach here, and my body gets that, but my mind struggles a LOT. How do you deal with this? Any advice or encouragement would be very appreciated, and I'm realizing this is really long so thank you so much if you've read this far 😊

Posted by staceychantal at 2023-03-02 18:39:08 UTC