Waking up Early and Not-so-Chronic Pain

 

I got up at 5:30 which is three hours before my normal time to 'rise and shine' as my mom used to order me to do each morning when I was kid. "Rise and shine!" she'd yell in the hall between my brother's and my bedrooms, "It's daylight in the swamp!" The sky was starting to show some pinks and lavenders through the bare trees across the green space in from of my apartment, something I hadn't seen in a very long time. Back when I was plowing snow I used to see the sun rise often, to the point that I had better words to describe the pastel mistiness that washes the sky like a watercolor painting in the crisp dawn air. How can anyone not love watching the day come to life?

I looked for the deer they say are often around that time of the day. I looked for the raccoon that leaves tracks in the snow on my deck. I looked for the white tailed skunk I've seen several times but have learned not to talk about it because other people living here freaked out on my report and want to see it and the racoon exterminated. A heavily wooded area was destroyed to build this independent living facility and in my mind we humans need to adjust to live in peace with the displaced wildlife that survived the disruption. White tailed skunks are rare in this part of the country. I researched her on our DNR site and found someone had photographed another white tailed skunk sixty miles away at our state capital. They were as excited as I was to see something they'd never seen before. Not only are the tails white and bushy but the stripes down the backs are wider than on our normal skunks. The first time I saw my skunk all that pure white fur was backlit by parking lot lights and she was stunning.

It was a dream that woke me up. In the dream I was telling myself, "it's just a dream, you need to wake up!" WAKE UP!" I was in that state of Sleep Paralysis which happens sometimes when you are conscious during waking up or falling asleep but you can't move any part of your body. It doesn't happen to me often but when it does it rattles me enough that I can't go back to sleep. 

The only details in the dream that I remember are that my husband took the dog out for a walk and they didn't come back. I waited and waited and worried until I got out of bed in the dream and found he'd left me a hug jar of honey on the kitchen table. Dreaming of honey, according to the dream dictionary, can mean a lot of positive things including that the dreamer has a strong support system which I'm going with in this case because that evening I had had long talks with both of my nieces who were concerned about the outcome of my appointment with my orthopedic doctor. One of my nieces and I had even talked about it being time to start eating a daily teaspoon of locally sourced honey to build up an immunity for our summer and fall allergies.

I don't think I mentioned it before but all winter I've been experiencing a lot of pain in my right arm from my wrist to my elbow. And since it's in same arm that I broke my elbow in 1999, I had myself all worried and worked up thinking it was finally time to do something about the botched surgery, as my current bone doctor calls it. I saw him about this same thing (when the level of pain was much less) last summer and back in 2018 when I wrote: "One of the screws that once held the top of the ulna bone to the bottom was floating around free-willy in my flesh. Another screw that looked to be around 1 ½ or 2 inches long had backed half way out and was no longer anchoring the ulna bone to the radius bone like it was supposed to do, and a stress fracture was showing a few inches below the screw." Xrays taken this week showed both screws are free-willy now, but the doctor can feel their heads through my skin and he doesn't think they are causing my pain. Back in 2018 when this was first discovered he didn't want to do anything to try to correct "the mess" because, he said, would be “a major ordeal involving a very long surgery, weeks in a cast and  months of physical therapy.” I was advised back then to never again lift anything above my waist or ever pick up anything over five pounds with that arm. When I forget, it lets me know.

This week the doctor gave me a shot in my wrist as part of a diagnostic procedure to track down why I can't do things like put my right hearing aid or earring in without pain and dozens of other movements that jabs me with pain through out the day and night. And soon I start a 13 day round of 20 mg prednisone as part of his diagnostic process. The most I've ever had of prednisone are rounds of 4mg so I'm a little concerned about side effects but I trust my doctor. If the wrist shot works (which it did like magic but for only 24 to 36 hours) it means the majority of the pain is coming from arthritis in that area but if the pain in my forearm goes away with the prednisone then the source is coming from crushed and arthritic vertebrae in my neck. It's possible that both are in play. Once he figures that out he'll be able to form a treatment plan that could involve a nerve block on my neck and/or gel shots in my wrist---and "other options" we didn't get into. I'm relieved that elbow surgery is off the table. The bones are fussed together though not lined up right, but they are in no danger of rendering my elbow non functioning which I invented and feared in my worse case scenario. If I live long enough the screws could start cutting through my skin and they'll be easier to remove then. Shrapnel tends work its way outward if no nerves or organs get in the way. On a side note: did you hear that Russia is now dropping shrapnel by drones on Ukrainians to maim, not kill them, in an attempt to overwhelm their healthcare system and give them painful fragments they'll have to live with because they aren't all easy to remove?

Back on topic: All and all things are looking up. I've got a busy March in front of me including some promising looking art classes taught by a college professor and my sense of feeling old and defeated has lessened just knowing a have a path towards feeling better. I'm still struggling to get in enough exercise to make a real difference but nicer weather is on the way so that will help get me outside walking again. By then my fellow residents will quit walking around with ashes on their faces and filling up the calendar with 'churchy' stuff. If that sounds irreverent or disrespectful, I'm sorry. I'm not a fan of the Easter season and listening to how beautiful the Stations of the Crosses ceremonies are, which are repeated here four weeks in a row. I just can't relate to the somberness of the occasion and the bitten-by-the-spirt looks in the eyes of those who take part creeps me out. Not to mention my mom died on Easter which led to a trauma filled couple of years making peace with her very preventable death. 

Nope. I'll buy yellow Peeps but that's the extent of my Easter celebration and this year even that didn't turn out well when one of my table mates at lunch told me my four pack of tradition yellow marshmallow rabbits was pure sugar and not good for fatty-two-by-fours like me. Not her words but implied. More on that conversation in my next post. ©

 Until Next Wednesday...

 

I spent a lot of time trying to track down the author of this poem with not luck and I hate that he or she isn't being created properly. If anyone recognizes it, please leave a comment!

Ice Cream, Screens and Clams at High Tide

After spending way too many days in a fog of pain I’m getting my range of motion back in my neck. It’s not totally there yet but at least I don’t want to crawl under a rock and play kissy-face with a toad to get him to let me share his space. All I’ve wanted to do is hide in a cool, dark place and I’ve discovered that an ice pack wrapped in a kitchen towel and held in place by a chip-clip makes a nice fashion statement. Ice Collars by Jean. My third appointment with the chiropractor was yesterday and I don't need a forth unless I'm not back to normal in a week. The Recuperation Train, she says, is running on schedule. My words, not hers. She talks like an adult.

One of those days when I wanted to cohabitate with a toad I went to an ice cream social at the senior hall instead. It’s a free event and they tend to result in more people wanting to go than the place can hold. So when you get your RSVP approved it’s not fair to those who didn’t, not to show up. I lucked out and sat near two ladies from my Gathering Girls group and our table was dismissed first to get in line to build our own sundaes. The entertainer, a guitarist and singer, was good but I couldn’t turn my head enough to see him and I wasn’t in the mood to hear songs my mom used to play on a Victrola when I was a kid. Listening to those old tunes while in pain made me feel ancient and I wondered, how old does this guy think we are? In between songs, I made my great escape and I only felt half guilty for leaving early. 

On the way home I had an errand to run. I needed to pick up three window screens and return one I had picked up a few days before because the newly replaced screen fabric was baggy. The lady at the counter must have had a cob up her butt because when I (nicely) showed her the problem she said, “Well, that’s what happens when you order fiberglass instead of aluminum.” I was shocked and in no mood to get balled out like that. My voice turned as snippy as hers when I replied: “I’ve had five or six screens redone here over the past few weeks and this one is the only one that looks like it was done by a ten year old! And,” I added, “When I started this process no one told me there WAS an aluminum option.” She took the screen back to the work area and came back with a message that they’d redo it. “Wait in your car and I’ll bring it out when it done.” By the time she brought it out and showed it to me her snippiness was gone, probably because the difference in the screen was so obvious. I went home, took an Aleve, put on my “ice collar” and pouted about mean Mrs. Cob-Up-Her-Butt until I forgave her. Maybe that cob was giving her as much pain as my stiff neck.

Remember Larry the Cable guy? This week I had a service call from my own Larry the Cable Guy. Actually, I got two cable guys for the price of one and one actually looked like Daniel Whitney who played Larry the Cable Guy. He mostly did the work required outside and down the basement while grandson-material-Jason fixed all my issues on the main level and I had many. One of my TV’s picture was breaking up at a certain times of the day (a downstairs issue) one of my remotes wouldn’t hold its programing (an improper setting in the TV) and he set me up with a new remote for the bedroom that glows in the dark. (That's going to save me a ton of stress because pushing the wrong buttons in the dark takes me to places I can't return without an agent on the phone to walk me through it.) I also got a new signal receiver outside since mine was twelve years old and Jason checked the speed of my computer. I was as happy as a clam at high tide when they left but the next morning the problem I called about---the picture breaking up---was back again only worse! Back to square one.

Trivia note: The phrase ‘happy as a clam at high tide’ has been around since at least 1833 when it first appeared in print in a memoir and by 1848 it was included in John Russell Bartlett's Dictionary of Americanisms. The theory is it evolved because at high tide clams open up and they look happy in that state. Over the years, we’ve dropped the 'high tide' part and now most people just say, "I'm as happy as a clam." Old metaphors endure because we're too lazy to come up with new ones, but that's also pretty cool when you think about it. I wish I could write a metaphor that a google search two hundred years from now would trace back to me.

I was trying to find a quote or meme about pain to end this blog and it’s clear that society admires people who power through it with smiles and quiet humility. My neck issues will be gone in time if I don’t do anything to inflame it again---I have to curtail my upper body strength training at the YMCA for two weeks---but after the week I’ve had I’ve learned I’m still a little girl at heart; I’ve wanted my mommy, ice cream and a good cry. At least I got the ice cream. ©

A Royal Pain in the Neck

 

After dinner when the heat of the day gets pushed aside by deep shadows in my back yard I’ve been sitting out on my deck reading until the fireflies announce that the light is fading fast. The new book club selection is over 650 pages of foreign words, strange customs and medical terms describing things I don’t want or need to know about. The story centers on a set of twins growing up in a small mission hospital in tumultuous Ethiopia during the ‘50s and ‘60s. If you’re getting the idea that I’m not enjoying the book, you’d be right. But I’m stubborn so I keep reading my required two chapters a night so I’ll get the darn thing finished in time. If there was a movie version of Cutting for Stone I’d cheat and rent it but it’s still in production according to IMDb. I’m only on page 361 but I understand part of the book I haven't read yet takes place in the slums of New York City where one twin becomes a surgeon while the other twin stays behind as surgeon at the mission, but I don’t imagine the change of scenery will make me warm up to the book. The story will still revolve around abject poverty, bloody surgeries and boys with lusty thoughts. After reading pages and pages and PAGES of detailed descriptions of surgeries, I could probably do vasectomies and turn babies around in breach. Crawl up on my kitchen table. I’ll take care of that. Two years on the New York Times Best Sellers List and all I can do is wonder if I’m the only reader who doesn’t understand half of what I’m reading and doesn’t care about the other half.

This evening as I read out on the deck the dog was being a royal pain. Usually he’ll sit quietly watching for rabbits who try unsuccessfully to violate the fence around the neighbor’s vegetable garden and listening intently for the jingle-jangle of dog tags announcing that pitbull’s who live directly behind us have come outside to play. This time of the year we can’t see them but Levi knows when they are happily running around ignoring his whining and barking pleas for me to let him join in their games. Please mom, let me go over there! “No, Levi those big boys could eat you for a snack and still be hunger.” Tonight was different. He wasn’t happy on the deck. Levi wanted to go inside the house, then when he’d get there he’d want to come back outside. Back and forth he went until I finally got tired of being his personal Jack-in-the-box, popping in and out of my chair like a wind-up toy and I went inside with him. Levi wasn’t finished annoying me. He made me follow him into the kitchen where I’d forgotten to feed him. He’s the perfect dog for an old person because there isn’t anything he’ll let slide. Food, water, potty breaks, dental sticks and bed time---he’s very vocal about all these things until he gets through to me that he’s got a schedule fixed in his head and I'm messing with that.

I had a good excuse for forgetting the kibble. I spent the weekend in a lot of pain---not the urinary tract infection kind, that’s gone---and I wasn't even feeding myself. This time it was shoulder and neck pain. I’m not fond of chiropractors, in fact they scare me, having known several people who ended up having a stroke on their tables. But I could feel something was out of place so I called Monday morning and by the time my afternoon appointment was over I was feeling 60% better. I left with instructions to come back if I wasn’t 100% by Wednesday. She thinks I pinched a nerve while sleeping on my side and we had the don’t-crack-my-neck conversation. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m going to have to do it.” She contends that anyone who has a stroke on a chiropractor’s table would have had one within a few hours anyway and having it then, where it’s recognized for what it is, could possibility save a person’s life. She used the example being home alone so you wouldn’t/couldn’t get to the hospital within the four hour window to get the drug to reverse a stroke. I’d rather not get my neck cracked, thank you very much, but I didn’t see a shotgun sitting in the corner to put me out of my misery. She did the dirty deed---without my permission---when I wasn’t expecting it, then she promised that was the worst thing she’d do to me. As I write this on Tuesday night, I can tell I’ll be calling back tomorrow for another treatment. Pain is still a melody playing softly underneath my every move. If I don’t post a blog on Saturday you’ll know the chiropractor killed me. ©

Report From Pain City, USA

A Recent Dream: I was sitting in a classroom with just a small towel wrapped around me and I kept pulling on it, hoping it would cover my ‘ya-ya’ but it wasn’t doing a very good job. My dearly departed husband was sitting in the front row talking to another woman but before the class was over she left, he followed. I watched them through the window in the door and try as I might, I couldn’t chase after them. He had the car keys and I was stranded, left behind without a second glance! That’s when I woke up and discovered my knee seemed to be frozen in place and any attempt to straighten my leg shot a terrible pain through my thigh. I keep a cane near my bed because I often wake up with foot cramps that need to be walked off to make the cramp go away. I used it to hop to the bathroom, each hop causing unbearable pain. I fully intended to get dressed and find someone to take me to emergency afterward. But first I sat on the toilet and when I got back up a miracle happened. I could straighten my leg and the pain was completely gone! The episode scared the starch out of my illusions of being self-sufficient because without that cane I would have been stuck in bed and you know what would have happened next. Yup, I’d have peed my pants and have to use the I’ve-fallen-and-I-can’t-get-up button around my neck. 

A few days later I had an appointment with my orthopedic surgeon to get the results of my bone density test and I described the above episode to him---minus the parts about dream, my naked ‘ya-ya’ and the fear of wetting the bed. He guessed the pain didn’t come from my replacement knee---my guess---but rather from a pinched nerve between one of the bad vertebrates in my back and if it happens again, I need to come back in for more x-rays. Oh goodie, I just had a full set taken from my neck to my knees. They proved, by the way, that the once-a-day shots I’ve been doing to build my bones from the inside out actually did some good. They brought my numbers up to one point over dreaded line where you can expect fractions by just doing ordinary things like getting out of a chair which, of course, ended my aspirations of being roller derby queen when I first found out about my bad bones. 

I asked the doctor if being over ‘the line’ means I have to go back to getting bone density scans every two years instead of every year. And he said, “Good question” and explained that most insurance companies won’t pay for it yearly when you’re over ‘the line.’ “But,” he added, “I’ll cover the cost of a yearly scan if your insurance company won’t. Just let me make a note in your records about what I just said.” I love that guy. When the local hospital decided that all orthopedic surgeons had to use the same brand-name and size joint replacement parts regardless of  a patient's body type, weight or sex he and a few other bone doctors in town built their own surgical center.

Today I made a second trip out to the online auction house in the country. This time I took twenty items. They start everything out at a dollar regardless of estimated value so it will be scary watching the first batch go live. I’m making good progress in my garage. I’ve also called the recycling center to find out how to recycle old computers, printers and telephones and I have some of those things to drop off next week. While purging out there I discovered several large and totally empty boxes, who knew! It was a gift from the land of creating space. I’m feeling very good about my summer goal in the garage---to completely strip it of things I don’t want, don’t need and won’t move when I sell. 

Levi my Mighty Schnauzer had to get some dental work done today. He had nine teeth pulled in addition to the nine they pulled last summer. Poor guy, he’s only got 24 left. In two and a half years my “doggie care account” will be drained and he’ll be toothless. He’s such a baby about pain; he’s walking around whining and looking at me as if to say, “Can’t you help me?” I'm not a very good mother when it comes to brushing his teeth so I have to suck it up regarding the cost, but this year we’ll be trying a daily spray to keep his gum disease in check. I need to remember weeks like this when I get it into my head that I want a second dog. 

I need a nap. I got up too early every day this week and I’ve had a hard time falling asleep a few times at night. I’m worried I’ll wake up in pain again and my ‘ya-ya’ will be naked when the ambulance guys come to haul me away. ©