Hi,
I have a lot of health issues and the newest is osteoporosis and osteopenia. My others are CRPS, arthritis and I’ve also had a SAH. I suffer a lot of fatigue so am very limited in exercise. I can’t take impact on my right leg due to the CRPS. My wrists and thumbs are very weak from the arthritis. Getting down to floor is exercise enough in itself. I’m permanently on crutches. Use a wheelchair for long distance, get overwhelmed easily by busy places or being outside, so am really struggling to know what I can do. My husband is also very poorly and currently unable to get me to a physio appointment. Any advice greatly appreciated
Hello Linda, welcome to the group.
Gosh, you do have problems don’t you! Interesting to meet someone else with CRPS. It is such a weird condition and no one seems to have heard of it. I developed it after I fractured my wrist in 2020 - right when Covid was kicking off so it was tricky getting the help I needed. Fortunately the fracture liaison physiotherapist phoned to ask about my wrist and I told her my wrist was great but my hand was trashed and I was pretty sure I had CRPS and she got me started on desensitisation exercises and got me organised with online hand physio which made a huge difference. What is happening for your CRPS? Are you getting physio or anything?
Could you get hospital transport or is there a community car service in your area that could get you to hospital for a physio appointment? Or perhaps get a neighbour to take yu? Could you contact your physio to see if you could be given any sort of chair exercises to do at home - you don’t want to be getting on the floor of it isn’t safe - you could even speak to your GP and see if there is any possibility of a physio coming to your house for a few sessions.
You could do with getting some exercises for your hands too - even just squeezing a ball or Thera putty. If you look online you will find there are lots of simple exercises for arthritic hands, I got a list of hand exercises when I broke my wrist but I’ve got inflammatory arthritis and the exercises I have for that are pretty standard hand exercises. Look on the ROS website and see what exercises yu see there.
I hope you can find something here that is a possibility for you. Good luck.
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Hi Lizzie,
I’ve had CRPS for so long that pain clinic have discharged me, I do exercises every day for it, my meds are quite effective so, there’s nothing else they can do for me according to them. I did ask my GP to refer me again but she said the waiting list is so long. She wants me to see the practice physio, I’ve already had to cancel 3 times because of hubby’s health. Neighbours aren’t interested in helping and no family/friends around. Hence me asking the question!
I’m so sorry that you can’t find a way to get to your physio appointments. It’s difficult that you’ve been signed off by the pain clinic although if they feel they’ve done their bit with your pain I suppose they feel they’ve done their part.
At the height of my CRPS I found this article which I found really interesting https://rsds.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/12/carlsen-reversing-chronic-crps-II.pdf
I’m not saying it applies to you but I just found it interesting to read. CRPS is really a fascinating condition (albeit one you’d definitely rather not have! I certainly didn’t want it) I felt as if someone had chopped my hand off and attached a giants hand or my hand had turned into one of those huge baseball catcher’s mitt things. I used to do mirror therapy and be convinced my ‘bad ‘ hand could move normally and when I removed the mirror - well it couldn’t.
Hopefully you might be able to get to the practice physiotherapist at some point - if you explain the circumstances (and beg!) could a house visit be arranged? Or could you get zoom physio like I got during Covid?
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