Back on the bike: How a simple injection healed a torn hamstring
For weeks, Jess Miller couldn’t sit comfortably — during a car ride, at a table, even on her Peloton. A clear diagnosis, platelet-rich plasma (PRP), and physical therapy helped her get back to moving without thinking twice.
Jess Miller started sitting as if she were trying not to sit.
“I was sitting half on chairs, half off,” she says. “It was really uncomfortable.”
Mrs. Miller, 67, lives in Bellefonte with her husband. They stay active in their home gym — Peloton rides, free weights, Pilates – and their 2 kids and 4 grandkids keep them busy, too.
When something deep in her hamstring stopped feeling like a normal ache, it didn’t just interrupt workouts. It changed everyday life in a way she didn’t see coming.
The car ride that made it real
Mrs. Miller can’t pinpoint the exact moment it happened. “To be honest, I don’t have a moment in time where I know that I did it,” she says. She remembers doing deadlifts and a vague pinch but blew it off.
A couple of days later, she and her husband drove to see their son, who lives a couple of hours away. “It hurt the whole time I was sitting,” she says. “It just burned.”
So she did what a lot of active adults do when something hurts — she iced, took ibuprofen and tried to keep going. Then she started questioning. She looked up symptoms online. She wondered if it was bursitis.
But she had a secret weapon: Her daughter, Hannah Fanelli, MD, is a Geisinger sports medicine physician who practices in Lewistown and State College. Mrs. Miller didn’t want to overreact or over-text her daughter. “My husband and I are always hurting ourselves,” she says. “So if we talked to her every time we did something, we would make her insane.”
But about 2 weeks after her mom’s injury, Dr. Fanelli recommended a colleague of hers, Brian Jacobs, DO, an orthopaedic sports medicine specialist. By that point, Mrs. Miller couldn’t ignore the pain. “It wasn’t unbearable, but I was constantly aware of it and mostly when I was sitting.” she says.
The scan and the plan
At her first visit, Mrs. Miller says the team started with ultrasound imaging which revealed her hamstring was partially torn.
They performed a diagnostic lidocaine injection at the tear site. “If the lidocaine helped,” Mrs. Miller says, “that showed they had pinpointed the area that needed to be repaired.”
She felt temporary relief from the lidocaine, so the doctors recommended PRP treatment. After reviewing the science and expected efficacy of PRP and asked if she wanted to move forward, it seemed like a no-brainer to Mrs. Miller: “I said yes.”
She came back to Geisinger Healthplex State College 2 weeks later for the procedure.
To her, the choice felt clear. “I could have let it go, or I could have had actual surgery, I imagine,” she says. She didn’t like either of those options. PRP, which starts with a blood draw and uses the plasma part of a person’s own blood injected into the injured area, felt like a straightforward, less invasive path.
“The care was excellent, and the procedure was so simple and flawless,” Mrs. Miller says. “It was almost hard to believe that what they did in that procedure was going to heal me. It was a simple drawing of blood and an injection.”
From cautious to confident
After the procedure, Mrs. Miller was surprised to find her pain wasn’t bad.
For a while, she had to follow a different routine to keep the injection where it needed to be. “I wasn’t even allowed to do Pilates,” she says. “I only did some upper body work.”
By the next month, she started physical therapy twice a week for about 6 weeks. The sessions rebuilt something she didn’t realize she’d lost: trust in her body.
The physical therapist got Mrs. Miller back to doing things she’d become afraid to do at home. “And then once we started doing them, I knew I could do them and felt really confident,” she says.
Back on the bike
Even as she improved, the simple act of sitting took longer to come back than she expected — especially on her Peloton.
But now, she’s back on the bike. “I mostly ride to warm up now, but it doesn’t hurt at all,” she says. “I don’t even think about it.”
To anyone else is weighing their options for a soft tissue injury — rest, surgery or doing nothing because they’re nervous — Mrs. Miller doesn’t hesitate. “I would totally highly recommend the PRP procedure,” she says. “I wouldn’t even be afraid.”
Her doctor agrees. “Every day, we try to treat you like family,” Dr. Jacobs says. “This is an example of family helping family.”
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