INSPIRING REHAB STORIES

Rehab is a journey you do not sign up for, but once over you will be grateful it was part of your life.

I want to open a little blog series of inspiring rehab journeys I have witnessed in my work as a physiotherapist. Somehow, they shaped me into the physio I am now and they taught me something new. Other than that, I see the potential for these stories to inspire other people who are finding themselves into difficult injuries.

The first episode is about Fabian.

I met Fabi’s for the first time in December 2023. I remember his sister, my colleague, introduced me to him saying: he’s desperate, he tried it all but nothing helped.

I always tremble inside when I hear, nothing helps, as chronic pain is a terrible experience for the patient. And a chronic pain that keeps you off your sport and your work it carries so much frustration and a big sense of mistrust toward the healing process.

But life is a challenge, it is made of ups and downs and once you accept this rollercoaster motion, you’ll be able to navigate the roughest seas.

Fabian, other than being an incredible heart kinded soul, is an excellent climber, skier and golfer.He’s a mountain guide and is used to live under stress also while managing his family hotellerie business in Zermatt. But I think before his shoulder injury, he never experienced any serious injury that kept him off his sports, work and passion for so long.

Injuries are never the same and every person can have a difference experience of it.

Injuries sometimes come and if, like Fabi, you’re used to endure physical pain, you most likely won’t notice them until it will be too obvious not to. The subtle onset is what makes it hard to accept for most of the patients. You do not see it coming, yet you notice it stopping you from doing what it really is important for you.

Fabian rehabilitation journey has been my biggest challenge so far as a professional; it felt often very uncertain. It taught me the importance of trusting the process, of being clear in the communication, of keeping patience, of gradually progressing with loads and of how big the results are if you are constant in your training.

This kind of injury is one of the hardest struggles for both physios and athletes. As these injuries are not given the attention needed from the beginning, it is then easy to develop compensatory patterns that are useful to keep performing with the body until the system fails to cooperate.The compensatory patterns lead to disconnection with the body.

And what is amazing is that we often do not recognise that we are becoming completely disconnected from our bodies as we keep functioning.

When the system stops coping and the compensatory patterns are not enough anymore to let the machine function, the athlete must reconnect with the body first.

There is no way to progress in rehabilitation if first the athlete does not connect his mind with his body again.

I think this was the most inspiring part of Fabian's rehab journey.

Our rehab started with Fabian experiencing frustration, despair and a sensation of helplessness and hopelessness. I felt from the beginning that our work together would not be a short one.I felt I did not have to rush to get to an outcome with Fabian, but rather approach our journey with patience and trust.Rushing a return to sport is often not leading to success. The key to a safe and successful return to sport sits in patience, trusting the process and hours of rehab work.

With Fabian, our rehabilitation followed a path that, looking back, I now recognise as a sequence of important steps.

The first one was the recovery of the mind-body connection. Before asking the body to perform again, we had to learn how to feel it again. To understand what was happening around the shoulder, to reconnect with the muscles and to become present in the movement.

Then came the recovery of mobility. This required a strict everyday routine. Mobility is not something we can restore with one treatment or one exercise session. It requires commitment from the athlete and consistency over time. It is often the small things repeated every day that create the long-term change.

Once mobility was restored, we could start rebuilding connected muscle strength. Not simply asking the muscles to become stronger, but rebuilding strength while maintaining that connection with the body. Learning to feel the muscles, use them efficiently and progressively ask more from them.

From there, we moved into regaining functional abilities. We started bringing the shoulder back into movements and tasks that belonged to everyday life, gradually increasing the demands on the body.

Then came regaining sport-specific abilities. This is where rehabilitation starts becoming more specific to the person again: preparing the body for the particular movements, loads, positions and demands of Fabian's work and sports.

And finally, a safe and conscious return to sport. Fabian could return into sport with another awareness: he would sense when it went into an overload and he would have the tools to manage the situations. He suddenly regained the awareness needed to not expose his body to a re-injury and he worked to increase the tolerance to stress his shoulder needed to regain in order to perform into the activities he likes to be involved in.

We worked together for two years until we could finally state Fabi was fully recovered from his shoulder injury. The first three months were just focusing on mind-body connection and restoring mobility. There is no rehab protocol that fits everyone. Every athlete progresses at his own timing and some will have to dedicate more time to connecting the body and some others to strength or power training, but you can not skip to step 2 if you are still in disconnection with some muscles in your body, and sometimes you can not feel your muscles if first you do not go into manual therapy and restore mobility and give the nerves some space underneath the structures above them.

oh... our body is a fascinating group of structures well functioning within each others.

The best is that we learn to take care of it by listening to its “danger signals”, to connect with every structure individually in order to feel them and be able to use them efficiently and, last but not least, to be patient and trust that the time off from our sports is an investment for our future performances and for our life with an ageing body.

Fabian taught me to have patience and trust in the rehabilitation journey without feeling the pressure to be back to performance as soon as possible, but rather aiming for real healing.