Bonus Book Chapter: That Time I Was a Big Baby About Getting an MRI

Dear Reader: For the remainder of 2021, to continue celebrating the release of my first book Kicking and Screaming: a Memoir of Madness and Martial Arts, I will be posting a monthly bonus chapter. While these stories didn’t make the final cut, they were still important moments in my life and in my black belt journey.

Enjoy the final chapter in this series!

[Note: This would have occurred after the Epilogue]

In early 2016, I had a follow-up appointment with my orthopedic doctor to check on my hip and hamstring. As I waited in the brightly lit and comfortable waiting room I grew more and more excited to tell him about how well I was doing in therapy. By that point, unless I pushed extra hard in taekwondo or had an unusually long commute, my aching right hamstring stayed fairly quiet. My physical therapist added more advanced exercises like stepping up on a box to jump with one leg or squats on an upended Bosu ball, so I’d gotten a lot stronger over the past month. My hip and sometimes the back part at the top of the hamstring still popped and clicked, but there’s something oddly satisfying about that feeling.

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The Spirit is Willing, But the Flesh is Weak…But Sometimes the Spirit Needs to Chill Out and Listen to the Flesh

lower back pain

Part One: The Taekwondo Spirit is Annoyingly, Overachievingly Willing

Last night in class, which is affectionately known as “cardio night,” my chief instructor tried out a new drill. Instead of setting us up in three lines to do drills straight back and forth across the middle of the room he had us make one long line that snaked around to the side. I wasn’t sure what was going to happen, but I knew it was going to be high-energy.
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Operation Fix My Hip Begins

kitten massage
So yeah this kind of has something to do with the post. I just used it mostly because it has cute kitties.

It felt appropriate that Sir Mix-a-Lot’s “Baby Got Back” was playing as I drove to my first physical therapy session. After all, most of the pain I’ve been experiencing for the last two months has been “in the back of my Honda,” and I don’t mean my 2014 Accord. I was both excited and a little nervous. While I was ready to put a lot of effort into healing I wondered if I’d have to go through even more pain and discomfort to get there, and I also wondered how much I would have to modify my taekwondo practice.
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