My newest hero has vanished, as heroes are wont to do, perhaps down the dark streets of Gotham City or off to the Fortress of Solitude.
Okay, she’s in Cumberland, Md. But before she moved on to her new job, Carla Colella, my physical therapist, revived my exercise program by figuring out what to do about an injury that just wouldn’t go away.
And that’s no small thing. As I whined in a column in January, losing the ability to exercise when you’re accustomed to regular physical activity can be life-changing. Getting it back is just as earth-shaking.
Like my doctors, Colella never determined precisely what caused the ache in my right groin and hip whenever I went running, though she suspects I injured my abdominal fascia while working out with a trainer last year, then created more problems by continuing to run. But as experts in movement issues, physical therapists get right to work helping patients like me by teaching us strengthening, stabilizing and stretching exercises even as they look for the problem.
“Sometimes we have to get to that very root of it,” says Mary Ann Wilmarth, chief of physical therapy for Harvard University. “But we can always give the person something immediately to start with that can help them.”
No offense to my physicians. The care I’ve received over the past several months has been superb. Suspecting a hernia, I went to see a doctor at my HMO, Kaiser Permanente. He examined me and referred me to a surgeon, Brian M. Cantor.
Cantor is an earnest, amiable guy who had me lie on his exam table while he checked me out. We chatted casually about the Redskins until he sank his fingers deep enough in my groin to examine my tonsils. Even that was not enough to find my problem for sure, so he sent me for an ultrasound exam.
There, three women — two technicians and a physician — peered intently at a screen while one of them rolled the device over my exposed hip and groin, and I tried to pretend there was more between me and them than the flimsy “drape” I had tucked into the top of my drooping boxers. I think of “drapes” as long, flowing lengths of fabric used to cover windows. This one was the size of a couple of sheets of paper towel.
Just to make sure, Cantor also sent me for an MRI. It seems as if I read about athletes having these every day, but the sports pages never mention the quart of thick, nauseating barium I had to drink before the test to ensure that my insides would show up on the computer screen.
And when it was done, I was back where I started: unable to run, with no clue what was wrong. So I asked Cantor to refer me to a physical therapist.
The Kaiser office where I met Colella is in a nondescript building not far off Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, in a neighborhood of commercial structures. Colella, 28, is one of the 180,000 physical therapists in the United States and one of the 20 percent who hold doctor of physical therapy degrees, which she earned at George Washington University. Like a small percentage of her peers, she is a contract worker, and she is taking advantage of the severe shortage of physical therapists in the United States to move from city to city before deciding where to settle down.
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