2014: My Road to a 200% Recovery

A full year's recovery later...The strongest and most fit I've ever been.

So, as all of you who read my blog regularly know, at the beginning of 2013, I contracted the EB Virus on a film set, and it rocked my body to all hell. Liver and kidney dysfunction, tonsillitis, 107 degree fever, the list goes on and on, and I won't bother to get into it here.

 Usually an EB Virus infection (much like when people get Mono in college) takes about 6 months to get over, and unfortunately some people never fully recover at all. By looking up the symptoms and their individual causes, and then aggressively attacking them one by one (cranberry juice to increase kidney function, copious amounts of yogurt and protein shakes to bring up white blood cell count, Bufferin as a fever breaker, etc), I managed to beat the symptoms and more or less return to normal in 2 weeks flat.

 Unfortunately, I also lost a lot of muscle mass, (and strength) and my body was so weak from the process that I tore a rotator cuff in my left shoulder putting on a jacket. Then while recovering from that, I destroyed the soft tissue in the back of my knee while working (which put me on crutches for 2 months). Then as a function of my not using my left arm for so long, the muscle atrophied, and my arm actually shrank. (Even more so than the rest of me after the infection). Needless to say, it was a rough year.

 While I was in the midst of dealing with all that though. I sore to myself and to whatever powers that be, that I would not just recover, but come back stronger than I ever have been in my life. In effect, I promised myself that in 2014, I would make a 200% recovery...and and it took me a full year, but here is how I did it.

 In the interest of keeping things short, I won't get into how I beat the EB Virus so quickly, as I've already written extensively about that in this blog. (Click to check it out here, if you want or need info on that.)

Part 1: Rebuilding the left arm and shoulder

 In terms of recovering from the shoulder injury, the first and most important step was committing myself to rehab, and then sticking with it, session after session, week after week, month after month until I had more or less all of the flexibility back. As aforementioned though, as a function of not using the arm, it also atrophied and shrank down in size considerably compared to the functioning right arm. Basically, even if I was getting flexibility gains back, it became so much weaker, without my even knowing it, I just stopped using it, further exasperating the problem...until I noticed how much smaller and thinner it was.

As such, step 2 was committing myself to using that arm for absolutely everything (but particularly carrying things) until it was back to a basic level of strength. In order to get the size back, next I committed myself to breaking my high school push-up record of 93 in a minute. To do this, 3 times a week, before bed, I would simply do as many push-ups as I could in a minute. At the time, I knew nothing about proper push-up form, and my technique was horrible...but I stuck with it until I broke 103, beating the record by ten.

 Here is the video of the process:


Part 2: Rebuilding the Knee
After that, it was time to repeat the process with knee. When my mother was still a practicing doctor, she told me about a cop she worked on, who completely destroyed his knee on the job, but loved his job, and was bound and determined to get back to it. She said it took him a year to do it, but with concentrated effort, he made a full recovery, passed all the strength requirements and was able to return to work without losing a step.

 While I had never met him, (or even learned his name) with that police officer as my inspiration, I knew that despite what everyone says, it is possible to make a complete recovery from a knee injury, and I would accept nothing less. Thankfully, I could go to the same place I went to for my shoulder, and the physical therapist could work on both during the same sessions. Once I could walk, even with a heavy limp, I just started walking on it. I started to get around without the crutches as much as I could without risking further injury, strain, or inflammation.

 I followed the home exercises my PT gave me to a tee, always ate well, rested a lot, and slept well, and recovery was smooth and even. Unfortunately, I was also offered three of the coolest stunt jobs in my career during that recovery, and doing them all back to back really took it's toll. As such, the knee recovery look a lot longer than that of the shoulder...but at this point, I can run and kick again, and as an indicator of my rehab's success, I set out to not just get my old physical stunt skills, but also develop new ones.

And here is a sample of a few of them. I couldn't do either of these techniques before the knee injury.


Part 3: Rebuilding Muscle Mass
 The last element to making the recovery was getting all of my muscle mass back, and then going beyond anything I have ever had. To do this, I enlisted the help of my good friend, Joe Almani, an actor and model friend who stayed with me in Tokyo for two weeks, who is also a certified personal trainer. Through Joe's exercises, and diet, I was able to not just get my strength back to what it was...but actually come back much stronger.

Here are the links to those vids as well:


 In any event, I am not writing this to brag or boast about my physical abilities, character strength, or achievements. I am writing this to share with people a simple fact I discovered: your body is YOUR body. It is an adaptable canvas, and you can choose the type of picture you paint on it. If you wanna paint a sad picture on it, you can give up on it; listen to nay-sayers or accept the idea that other people or other people's body is "just stronger". If you want to paint a beautiful picture however, it's just a matter of realizing that while every canvas has it's limits, it is still your canvas for the painting... And what I discovered, is that with careful and dedicated effort, even a broken or torn canvas can still create a work of art.

Rebuilding my left arm... among other things

Rebuilding my left arm

My right arm at my normal size

My left arm after partial atrophy
before I started rebuilding it. 

So after getting over the whole EB virus thing, I figured I was good and in the clear for the rest of this year. The doctor had warned me that  my immune system had been seriously compromised in the fight, and told me to take it carefully, and insomuch I as I thought, I was. Sure, every once in a while I could see signs of the weakened state peaking its ugly head out (like the cold-sores-just-from-biting-my-lip thing I mentioned in the last blog) but for the most part, after a month or two, I felt like I was back at 100% in terms of fitness, strength, stamina, etc.

Needless to say, I was pretty surprised when I found out that I tore a rotator cuff in my shoulder just putting on a jacket back in March. As it didn't really hurt at the time (it just kind of "popped") for a while I didn't think anything of it. As time worn on however, a slight discomfort started to develop in certain ranges of motion, and that gave way to pain... And loss of flexibility. Speaking with my Moms on the phone about it, (a retired doctor of occupational a medicine who works on work related inuries), she suggested that it was a rotator cuff tear, and sure enough she hit the nail on the head. By the time I figured out what the issue was for sure though (after finding an incredibly good physical therapy place in Futakotamagawa that I will blog about later), I was down to about 40% flexibility, and raising my arm above my head was almost impossible.
To make matters worse, while flexing the muscles for the wifey at the dinner table one night, she gasped, and told me something that neither one of us had noticed until then. Because I had almost completely stopped using it, my left arm had actually partially atrophied and SHRUNK. Hmmm... How can I put this....NOT COOL. If the there was any physical attribute that I had always taken the most pride in, it was the size and form of my arms. The size of my arms are what made me "look like a fighter" and now all of a sudden, they were uneven. (To see what I mean, check out the size difference in this vid.

First time for everything I guess!

With that, I set up an appointment at the physical therapy clinic that originally diagnosed the issue and they told me that basically, the issue was that after the Rotator Cuff tear, there was bleeding within the tissue. And the less I used my arm, the more that gave that loose blood a chance to solidify and harden into a scar inside my shoulder. While the scar could be softened with time, it would take at least 6 months of stretching and massages to get my full range of motion back.

Now after 5 months, they have made good on their word, and I am back up to about 90% flexibility with just a few more sessions to go, and no surgery required. Although there is still a slight size difference (and major strength difference) between both arms, I had recently started weight training again, and am confident that by the end of the year, I could have them equaled out...and have a better looking stomach chiseled out in the process.

For the first time since last year, I was looking forward to being fully back at 100% health... That is until this past Monday when I sprained my knee in a game of capture of the flag. Now I'm on crutches for the first time since I was a kid, and going through rehab for both my shoulder and knee at the same time. Not exactly the kind of set-back I had hoped for, but as far as Im concerned, it is still nothing more than that- a setback.

As the EB virus infection was the very first thing to happen when I returned to Tokyo at the start of the year, something told me that this was going to be a hard year with a lot of battles to fight. Thus far, it is turning out to be just that. Although there have been some cool victories (Such as Mars and I getting our new place) between the initial infection, the shoulder injury, a problem with the joints in one of my fingers that took a few months to get past and now the knee issue (and a resulting injured calf muscle that I just found out about today) this is turning out to be the most physically difficult year I've ever had.

At the same time though, strangely enough I can't say that I mind. It's kind of like when you are in the ring, and you can feel so many different parts of your body hurting, and you're exhausted, and your heart is racing, but you know that fighting that battle to carry on, (and other ones like it) is what defines you. It's that kind of experience that makes you, you, and overtime it's that feeling that becomes the source of your fearlessness and your invincibility. Overtime, every kind of battle and struggle that you face only reminds you of one thing: that you have won before and you can do it again... and that every one will make the next one easier to win. Yes, being on crutches sucks, but it doesn't suck as much as the first time when I was kid. (I was run over by a car the day before my birthday).

Furthermore, if I can rebuild my arm, then I can rebuild my damn leg too. My 35th birthday is about a week away, and I have no intention of still being on crutches by then. Furthermore, with only a few months left in this hard year, my dear readers, this is the declaration that I will make to you:

When 2014 starts, in one way or another, I will be the strongest that I have ever been.

And until that year starts, I will be working my ass off, and enjoying this fight. As the goo-goo dolls said in Iris, sometimes "you have to bleed just to know you're alive".