Port Pain and Pilates

I had a half-hour Pilates session today - my first ever. I did it to a DVD with two colleagues of mine. We found a quiet room at work and locked ourselves in so no-one could walk in on us! It was hilarious! The woman delivering the DVD was very muscular and really made everything look like a piece of cake. She would tell us to get into a particular position and we were all laughing our heads off crawling around on the floor and trying to copy her!!

If you don't know much about Pilates (I had no idea what it was - I thought it was some sort of Japanese Tai Chi sort of thing!), it's basically a whole series of slow, stretching and strengthening exercises designed to tone muscle. Most of the exercises are done sitting or lying on the floor and by the end of the session I had sore pelvic bones! I've ordered an exercise mat to avoid this problem in the future. We've decided to sign up for an 8-week course run at our local sports centre - it starts after Easter and I'm already looking forward to it in a masochistic sort of way!

The woman on the DVD made it look easy but it is actually really hard! My two colleagues had already done a session yesterday as well and were both aching today - I guess I've got that to come...

Anyway, it didn't all go smoothly. One of the exercises involved lying down on my left side with my arm stretched out above my head. I then had to raise my right leg up and down and then make circles in the air with it. Now, when I did this on the other side (my right side), I had no problems. But when doing it on my left side, the side my port is on, I got quite nasty pain around my port. It felt as though if I tried to carry on I might do some serious damage (like strain the muscle or tear the tissue or something) - so I stopped. I have experienced very minor, occasional niggles from my port area on and off since I was banded in November. But I've never experienced pain like this before. I wondered if I would get any port pain when I started swimming again, but I haven't - it's been fine.

So, I'm left wondering what this is all about. Will it be like this forever? Was this just a one-off? Next time I try that particular move I expect I will be a little nervous. I have posted a question about this on the UKGastricBand forum and will let you know if I get any insightful responses. Failing that, I am going to ask about it when I next go to a support group meeting (that's about three weeks off) and see what my Doctor says. If I get any recurrence of pain (i.e. without doing Pilates), I may even give my nurse a call and see what she says.