Stubborn Scot/Scandinavian

It probably doesn't surprise any of you that I'm not the world's greatest patient. I'm not a complainer but other than that, managing me is like, well, herding cats. ;) I'll follow instructions for maybe two days before I start going rogue and calling the shots on what I think my health requires.

You can probably guess where I'm the worst. Yup, you got it: pain management. And I don't mean overdoing the painkillers.

A couple weeks ago I had the opportunity to get a treatment from a Canadian Massage Therapist. For those of you who don't know, Canadian RMTs are required to have several thousand more hours of training than massage therapists in the USA. They're bona fide medical practitioners, more like our physical therapists than the technicians who work in our spas.

To top it off, the person I went to has a stellar reputation. She also has a very poor opinion of spa technicians in the USA, which set her up to think she could probably get my back and leg cramps sorted out in one session. She got my medical history and then started exploring the muscles in my back. Suddenly she went from very talkative to one word: "Oh."

As she checked other muscle groups, my response became, "yeah, that one too." As a 50 minute session extended to an hour and a quarter, the great unspoken in the room was, "you've been living like this?" But for me, the funniest moment was when she offered me a heating pad to use when my muscles lock up during the night. I nodded, but didn't say what was on my mind: I hadn't thought of doing something other than stretching to relieve that pain.

I come by it honestly; you probably wouldn't believe some of the stories about my grandfathers and great-grandfathers. (The women probably never told their stories.) It's a great heritage, but some of us need to remember that it's ok to get an intervention from time to time. Seriously. The world won't end and we'll be freeing ourselves for more opportunities. We might even give someone a challenge in the meantime.