Patient Spotlight: Meet Emily
Emily’s story is such a good one that we have put it together as a blog for you to enjoy. She came to Tom with a really unexpected injury that seemingly could throw her marathon plans out the window but through trusting the process and sticking to the plan she reaped the benefits. What an absolute legend!
Em first presented to our clinic after the Lake Macquarie Half Marathon on the 25th of August. She had intense pain on the inside of her left knee, was limping and had a lot of difficulty weight-bearing. She had no specific incident but did note a lot of pain from the 18km mark, which got a lot worse after the event. There was definitely some competitive streak stuff coming out here for Em, which she admitted! Emily noted that she definitely pushed the pace beyond probably what was appropriate for her capacity but the injury certainly wasn’t the plan with the Melbourne Marathon being on the calendar 6 weeks following …EEP!
I had a pretty strong suspicion she had Pes Anserine Bursitis, which can occur with a sudden spike in load and causes pain low down on the inside of knee. There was obvious inflammation but I was pretty confident she didn’t have any structural damage based off testing. As such, I didn’t want to; exclude her from the marathon but definitely knew her training would be impacted and I couldn’t be sure if it going to happen. We decided to throw everything at her knee to try and get it right.
I encouraged Em to continue training in the gym (Air Locker Kotara) but take a short rest from running, get prescription anti-inflammatories using Instant Consult and use Voltaren gel on the area. Over the subsequent weeks we did heaps of massage, dry needling and she used our Normatec boots pretty much every day. I gave Emily some loading exercises to try and strengthen the muscles of the tendon that connect to the site of aggravation.
Initially there was improvement but I encouraged her after about 2 weeks in to get a cortisone injection at Clarity Imaging. the ultrasound here also confirmed the initial diagnosis. From there she stuck to the plan, worked on her program, prioritised her recovery and gradually built her running back up. There were ups and downs along the way but generally things were going the right direction.
In the end, she made it to the Melbourne Marathon this weekend just gone and absolutely nailed it on the day. We made a plan for her to stick to a 6km/hr pace and she managed to stick to this plan without getting carried away, which paid off big time. Stories like these sum up why we love what we do at. Em is an absolute gun, a legend of a person and the results she got is a testament to her persistence, consistency and the trust she put in the process.
The next step for us is to do some more AXIT strength testing in 6 weeks time to further investigate what may have caused this in the first place and how we can bulletproof her strength so we can avoid anything similar happening again.
Great work Emily!
