One-Sided Twisting/Tightness: Jaw, Neck, Shoulder & Opposite Hip

Posting on behalf of my husband - if you have any similar symptoms, I would love to hear your experience. Back story (that may or may not be helpful): my husband was born in Ukraine in the early 1990s in a complex C-section. His mom said as a baby, he was always incredibly stiff. In 2022, he had a double jaw surgery to fix his airway. This helped with a lot, but this knot and condition persists. I appreciate any insight. Below is his commentary:

Imagine an invisible rod running vertically through the body from the head to the pelvis. I can feel a constant clockwise (like rotating the head from left to the right) twisting sensation running through my whole body around this invisible rod. It started as back pain in my upper right back 15 years ago. The left hip started hurting next. The right shoulder became tight and immobile, the right side of my jaw felt constantly clenched (severity highly correlated with stress), and a muscle in the left part of my neck would constantly be getting pulled. Basically, the right side of my body is chronically tight and the left is chronically injured with pulled muscle. My left hip started to give out when I'd go to stand and would be in pain a lot and I couldn't raise my right arm overhead. 2.5 years ago, I took up weightlifting and strengthened my hips to where they functioned normally, but the left side still hurt. I just stopped falling. I fixed the mobility in my right arm with chinups and overhead press, but it's still chronically tight and I experience burning in what feels like my right rhomboid. A year into weightlifting, my body felt better (still bad), but what feels like a very tightly-wound knot appeared in what feels like my mouth. I can move it around by moving my tongue and every movement of my body moves it and twists it up slightly. It feels like there's a rubber band connecting my chin to my right shoulder and they're constantly trying to unify. My right pec and right lat are chronically tight.

Clenching my jaw improved my breathing immediately (or used to before surgery), but if I let myself do it too long, my nose stops working and I'll wake up one morning and feel horrible and be almost unable to breathe. So I had to constantly be focused on this knot and consciously trying to relax/drop my jaw and loosen the knot. After surgery, I couldn't feel the knot. Two weeks in, it started to return and now it's back like it was before. I've noticed though that the knot actually moves and stretches significantly more from movement of my neck rather than jaw now though. My neck has poor mobility in basically every direction. I do a morning stretching routine and an evening myofascial release, stretching, and decompression/hanging routine. If I didn't do this before surgery, I would feel worse with every passing day until I could barely breathe without contorting myself into really specific positions. After surgery, the breathing issue is gone. But the knot is still twisting my body up constantly.

Before surgery, my thoracic spine was very rounded forward and my lumbar was hyperextended. Internal and external rotation of the hips and shoulders seems restricted. This seems to have improved already and my hip doesn't bother me anymore. My hope is that my neck and body made compensations to keep me breathing with a collapsed airway. Now that I have a new airway, I'm thinking maybe my body is just doing the only thing it knows and I need to retrain it to work with the new airway? I don't know how to do that though. Or how to fix this knot in my neck. That's why I came to you for help.