Sculpin

I’m still getting better. Today I’ve been cleared to take short walks as long as I carefully attend to the tingling level. Oh hell yes. I have not, however, been cleared to do the dishes. So I feel like I’ve reached some kind of local optimum in gimpage.

Speaking of things I’m supposed to be attending to with care, I was going to write about what I learned about pain these last few months, both my own experience and in general. I’ve done a lot of really painful things in my life. Still, this adventure in ow has been something special. (You know you’re in real pain when your cognitive function is better on the opiates.) Unfortunately, a windstorm is blowing in and the lights are starting to flicker. It looks like shutting down might be the better part of valor.

Quiet here, huh? I’ve mostly been writing over at Facebook; microblogging is good when sitting at a desk is a little much.

I had another epidural injection about a week and a half ago. They’re working brilliantly. I’m lucky: as herniated-disc patients go, I seem to be way out there on the awesome end of the recovery bell curve. The nurses and techs were floorjawed to see me up and walking at all. Don’t get me wrong: I still hurt and I still have to be cautious. But I can take very short walks now, and I’m even going back to work on Thursday for a few hours. That’s a big change from being almost completely unable to stand up.

Thank you to so many friends for offering support. I’m still working through the what-to-do ideas from my last post, and thank you all for them. Ted, your Pinkwater idea was brilliant. I had to spend a lot of time flat on my back, and listening to Pinkwater read his books made that time worthwhile. (I was a huge Pinkwater fan as a kid, but hadn’t kept up with his work; reading his new stuff felt to me like finding a new Jane Austen novel.) Amy, your chair was invaluable. Cabin fever would have had me chewing the drywall without it. Plus, I felt like you and Kill were my back-pain buddies in the Sisterhood of Ow — no matter how bad it got, I knew that you guys had been there, and that helped. Mia, your generosity made me all choked up. Carol and Ulysses, thank you for the stack of books — they were beautifully chosen for a whole range of cognitive capacity. I’ve really enjoyed revisiting the James Herriott books. Karl, that is a magnificent care package, and I’m especially happy to have a chance to watch Shimmer. You’re right: Sara del Rey is fantastic. (I love watching pro wrestling when I’m injured. Look, people who hurt more than I do!) Chris, thanks for playing delivery boy.
If I’m forgetting anyone, and I probably am, please blame the drugs.

And just everyone who dropped me a kind word, thanks. I thought of you guys as I went in for my second injection, which was psychologically difficult. Given that the first one felt like having my femur broken over and over — and I am not exaggerating here — I was bug-eyed with fear and dread going in the second time. I had my little beaded bracelet and kept going from bead to bead thinking, “I take refuge in the Buddha, I take refuge in the Dharma, I take refuge in the Sangha.” That, and holding Josh’s hand, and remembering that folks were rooting for me, kept the fear down to a dull roar. Even so, as I moved toward the injection room, I could feel my body becoming heavier and heavier. You know how when you take a cat to the vet, it magically becomes about four hundred pounds? I felt like that; my prefrontal cortex was saying “Yes” to the procedure, but the rest of me was saying, “Oh hell no.” If I’d had claws, they’d have been digging involuntarily into the floor. As it happens, the second injection was better, but it was better like having my leg broken only once. I hope I don’t need to do this again.

Anyway, it’s doing its thing. I am moving much more smoothly now, and have more complex motion in my walk. I’m still using a cane, and I’m thinking about using the push-chair for at least one more event, but I get around the house and yard entirely under my own power.

Apparently this herniation has been epic. Once she saw that I was up and recovering well, Dr. Ren started using phrases like “Oh my God it’s huge” to describe it. And Dr. Ren does not strike me as someone who says OMG on a regular basis. She’s… see, I perceive her as warm and relaxed, but she doesn’t put a lot into performing “warm and relaxed”, if you know what I mean. I adore her. She’s on exactly the wavelength that works for me. And thank goodness, because undergoing those procedures with someone I did not have a good feeling about would have been twenty times more awful.

If you’ve been following my facebook or livejournal entries, you’ve heard the news: I have a lumbar disc hernia the size of a small marble. I’m under treatment from a good physiatrist, and I hope to avoid surgery. I’ve cancelled plans for the next several weeks. We’ll just have to see how it goes.

That I could walk at all with that thing in my back was miraculous, with a healthy side order of “What the hell was I thinking?” Okay, so I guess I proved I was tough. Once again my strength of will outstripped my common sense by a significant margin. Note to self: strength of will is supposed to be in service to common sense.

I’m still screwed in terms of getting anything done. My first cortisone injection took out most of the pins-and-needles and about half the pain. With the help of tramadol and vicodin, this means I can do exciting things like sleeping and turning over in bed without biting back a scream. I can get to the bathroom without it being a big dramatic ordeal. And I have much of my brain back; before that shot, the pain was bad enough that I was actually more clear-headed on vicodin than off.

Sitting for more than a couple of minutes and (especially) standing for more than a few seconds, though, are things I still very much prefer to avoid.

I didn’t update here before because I couldn’t remember my wordpress password. It was written down in a little book that was across the bedroom; it might as well have been in Iceland for all I was going to get to it. Normally I’d just use my desktop machine with its autofill, but right now, no.

I have a snazzy laptop to use here in bed, but typing is a little tricky given the positions that are currently comfortable. So I owe some email, and what I’ve sent has tended to be terse. I can read just fine, but writing is harder. This post is taking me a while.

Some notes on the experience:

1. I mentioned using a wheelchair to someone who reacted with a certain degree of shock. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did, a little: wheelchairs totally look like instruments of liberation right now. Want. Even though sitting is not all that comfortable, WANT. (Also want a pirate hat and a sword, yarr.) I’ll probably rent one; if sitting gets easier, I’ll definitely rent one.
2. I cannot make my own coffee right now. Arrrgh. Fortunately, it does come in expensive little cans — the Starbucks “Doubleshot”.
3. At my request, Josh made me a Google form that helps me track my medications. Very handy. I should have used timestamping like this ages ago. No more, “I took that last one at noon, right? Oh hell, I’ll wait another hour just in case.”
4. After spending a lot of time reading in a supine position, I have a new preference for paperbacks. When you drop them on your head, they don’t leave marks.
5. I miss my chickens.
6. I really like hearing from friends. Thank you, friends!

Anyone read any good young adult novels lately? That’s about my speed right now. Good, kind of dumb movies or TV shows that I might find on Hulu? Boredom hasn’t really set in yet, but it will, it will.

So, around November 8 or so, Josh and I took out about half of our driveway. It’s in full sun, a really beautiful exposure; assuming it’s not horribly contaminated (I will be sending samples for testing) it’ll be a wonderful place to grow tomatoes once we get another raised bed in there.

We hadn’t really intended to do so much that day. I’d thought of it more as a day for proof-of-concept than anything else. But we got into the rhythm of it, using crowbar, 4×4s and sledgehammer to tear it up and break it apart. It was a lot of fun, and incredibly satisfying. Man, were we proud. A good day’s work.

I was unattractively smug the next day about hurting less than Josh (who turned out to be pretty nastily thrashed), though I did wonder about the odd cramps I was getting on my left side. And then after a few days, ye gods, my glutes, what the hell? And my leg! And lower back! Agh! Well, now I have a pretty good idea what the hell. I was the one doing most of the sledgehammering, and I strained the living daylights out of my left psoas. This probably wouldn’t have been too bad except for the Wood Chip Incident a few weeks later, when I reinjured it by hurriedly forking a mountain of woodchips off the sidewalk. And, um, turning the compost probably wasn’t a good idea either. I have, in short, been a big idiot. Once again, “Work through the pain” is not a great idea. It all got worse and worse.

As it happened, I had a standardized-patient gig a few weeks ago in which I played a patient with lower back pain. About the third time I had to fake my way through some tests that were supposed to be normal, I figured perhaps it was time to talk to my doctor. Josh and I see the same guy. It was kind of fun to go in and say, “Hey, remember when Josh came in last month with a back injury from taking out the driveway? Well…”

The good news is, I probably haven’t screwed up a nerve or slipped a disc. The other good news is, I am loaded up with Vicodin and muscle relaxants. The bad news is, I may well be like this for a good month longer. I was way too optimistic about how quickly this kind of thing heals. (Doctor: “And when you go up stairs, try going up only with your right leg and pulling your left leg up after.” Cam: “So, uh, not back to Pilates all that soon, then?” Doctor: *wince**twitch* “Yeah, probably not.”)

Anyway, I think I’m on the mend. I was having pain spikes up to 8+, but now they only go up to 6, 7 at the most. Whee. I can get out of bed now with just yelping instead of shouting, and I’m a lot less likely to be stuck all twisted up. But I’m pretty grouchy and impatient about it all.

The psoas does a lot for posture and balance, so it’s not a great idea for me to go sliding around in the snow. Which hasn’t kept me out of the snow entirely — I can get by with Josh’s Yaktrax plus two trekking poles if I don’t go far. But I’m getting stir-crazy here.

At least Facebook’s “Pet Society” is truly riveting when you’re on opiates. I have been racking up a tremendous score.

And I chipped in with my mom to buy Josh a gift certificate for a Long Haul Trucker for Christmas, so there’s some vicarious out-and-about fun. I can hardly wait to see Josh riding it! Go away, stupid snow!

When we take out the rest of the driveway, some fine day, we’ll do it right. Have a work party. Pizza. Beer. Maybe drag the stereo out and put the new Pretenders album on it. Let everybody have a piece of the fun, and (I hope) nobody have a piece of the ouch.

Well, it’s been a month and my knees never really did get all that much better. I guess that means it’s time for me to haul my carcass in to physical therapy. Just as soon as I get dug out around here. Hmph.

It’s almost certainly my own fault for not letting my knees rest. They’ve been just good enough for me to stump around on them; it’s only bike riding that really obviously aggravates them. But I probably did them no good when I was building the latest incarnation of the compost bin.

The new compost bin is designed to insulate the compost somewhat over the winter, and it’s basically a three-sided structure made out of sod, reinforced (barely) with cheap plastic-covered steel rods, with inside dimensions of roughly 3′ x 3′ x 5′. Properly speaking, I should probably drive some pipes through the sod walls to increase air circulation, but we’ll see how it goes. I’m enjoying how ancient and Celtic it looks now.

Wow, I really screwed up my knees last weekend. Good job, me. And then yesterday I overworked them. I’d forgotten that the level of pain that usually means, “Hm, maybe be a little bit cautious,” means, in my knees, “Back off now or pay the price, bitch.” I wish I’d remembered; I found it out after a yoga class, years ago, when we had a crack-brained substitute teacher who decided to whip us gimps into shape. I’d thought I might be cutting it a bit fine that day, but in fact I was cutting it way past fine and had bad knee pain for a week. Had to mostly stay off my feet for about three days, as I recall.

Let’s hope this one doesn’t take that long. In related news, I think I won’t be climbing hills for a while. Frankly, I am not sure I’d even want to hobble down to the parking lot to work on bike riding skills today.

I dunno about aikido for me, folks.

Here’s the thing. Chronic fatigue syndrome (I still dislike that name) has made me well aware of the varieties of fatigue. I divide them into three basic stages:

• Stage 1: Your brain is telling you that you’re tired. Really, really tired. Man, would you like to sit down. A nap seems like a good idea. Sheesh, what a long day/week/month. You just don’t think you can bear to drag yourself around. Your limbs are heavy. When I had mononucleosis, it was generally an advanced Stage 1 phenomenon.
• Stage 2: You start making unusual cognitive errors. Word-finding becomes difficult. Your judgment may become questionable. Your balance goes off. Your circulation may be somewhat restricted. Aural and visual perceptions get strange. You start having little mini zonkouts; you sit down to a plate of scrambled eggs and suddenly come to with your face a couple of inches from the plate. You become very spacey — I once nearly left the house without pants on, and while that’s pretty bad, the fact that I was actually ambulatory puts it into 2 rather than 3.
• Stage 3: you hit the Wall and you go down. I don’t care how much of a badass you think you are, or how much positive thinking you can muster, you’re going down. Maybe you have time to take off your shoes, maybe you don’t. Maybe you can be awakened, maybe you can’t. You may lose time in some kind of blackout stage before you actually sleep, and wake up to find that you’ve put your keys somewhere really weird.

In stage 1, you can suck it up and deal; in stage 2, you can often fake it; in stage 3, forget it, you’re toast. Hey, at least it doesn’t hurt.

I’m convinced that a fair bit of some able-bodied people’s jackassery about CFS comes from their applying stage 1 rules inappropriately to people who are dealing with the realities of stages 2 and 3 in their lives.

Anyhow, as I’ve been recovering from CFS, I’ve been able to spend a lot less time in the nastier stages of fatigue. That’s great. Stage 1 is really not all that bad; the difference between being unfatigued and being able safely to ignore and manage your fatigue is not as big as all that.

My strategy of the last couple of years has been to accept that I live in stage 1, purposefully visit stage 2, and avoid stage 3. (Too much time at the Wall of Fatigue seems to make things worse, not better.) You can imagine it this way: I live with a full-time flu and I put myself into light shock a few times a week. And this has been great. For somebody with my health history, I’m pretty badass. I attribute this to working tenaciously at my edge, not to mention having a lot of luck and support.

And here’s my problem. The edge is tricky. The edge is in stage 2. I can get sloppy when I get tired enough to be stupid, pale, and unbalanced. Usually it’s fine, but sometimes I screw up and injure myself. That’s okay when it’s just me. But in aikido, if I’m defending (the “nage” role), it’s my responsibility to make sure that the other person (”uke”) is safe. I’m not sure I can work at my edge and take care of uke.

I’m thinking I might have to wait a little while until I can be sure that I can fulfill that responsibility. Aikido’s a real reach for me, and it may be slightly too much of one. There’s not a lot of slack in the system right now, and I’m feeling pretty stretched here. On the other hand, I understand that things happen to everybody. I’m not the only person who can get sloppy in there. I just don’t know. We’ll see.

ETA: And having thought about it — it’s not cool of me to risk somebody else’s getting an elbow in the face because I’ve stretched it too far and can’t bring sufficient focus to the mat. I need to take some time to regroup, get over this damn lingering sinus infection, practice some rolls in the park, and build my strength and stamina for a few more months. Well, crap. I’m disappointed, but there it is.

Or as Garfield Minus Garfield puts it:

So this is a neat thing: I have a gig. Kind of a weird one, but it sounds like fun. I’ve been hired into the Standardized Patient Program at the UW. Basically, I’ll be a sort of medical actor/educator. My job is to play a patient for med students to interview and examine. More about that when I actually have some kind of experience to talk about! So far I’ve just watched some SPs at work; my first training is in a couple of weeks.

Sheesh, I’m going to be paid to act. How often does that happen? What a weird job! But I like the people there, and I like that it’ll use both sides of my brain.

I was a little concerned that my new classes in aikido would be a problem. Josh and I started lessons in January, and there’s been a whole lot of limping going on. After my first class, my left knee couldn’t hold me up reliably; it’d give out suddenly, and I’d crash into a wall or a sofa. I wasn’t injured, just extraordinarily sore. The soreness was epic. It’s gotten a lot better since then, but still, I’ve gotten stepped on and bruised; I’ve taken an elbow to the face; and I think I’ve got a pretty good shot at dislocating a shoulder in the next couple of years.

So I can see how I might confuse the med students, limping in all beat up and bandaged. But that’s nothing. They’ve got a guy there who does bike stunts. I would certainly not be the first standardized patient to come in with some interesting physical things to work around.

I’ve wanted to do aikido for a very, very long time. In high school, I had no money. (Not to mention how broke I was as a dropout.) In college, I couldn’t make the time work. After that, I worked at a startup, and then I got sick. I came back from that, I had one aikido lesson, and the van hit me. So now, finally, I am back and I am doing this thing.

Aikido is fun and fascinating, and I’m glad to be trying a discipline with more complicated movement, but I’m unsure. Sometimes I think I might have been better off doing tai chi. “Well, duh,” somebody’s thinking now, “You like your shoulder where it is,” but it’s not the injury potential. I’m just having a hard time in there, session after session. Part of it is that it’s just intrinsically really tremendously difficult, but what gets me down is that again and again I hit the same problem that I don’t know how to fix. I thought the CFS would be the limiting factor, but that I can work with. No, the hard problem has been the minor nerve damage in my left hand from that burn I took a few years ago. I hadn’t realized how strong the outside of my hand would have to be, and I don’t know if I’ll regain enough strength there. I keep having to slide on the side of my hand, and it folds on itself and collapses painfully. It’s probably time for me to talk to somebody about that, or a couple of somebodies.

On the other hand, I bring some weird strengths to the aikido practice as well. My time in Pilates has mostly served me very well there. If nothing else, aikido’s shown me more what it is that I’ve been doing in Pilates. (More about that later, probably.) I’m well aware of my hara, and I’ve learned to think my way through some movement chains in useful ways.

Also, you know, I fought my way back from a serious illness, all the way from being housebound until I could walk six miles; then I got hit in a crosswalk and had to do a whole lot of it all over again. Aikido is pretty hard, but I remember that it’s not nearly as hard as learning to go up stairs was: two stairs on one day, then three, then four, and then the amazing day when I did six stairs, oh hell yes. And after a couple of months, I could actually leave the house and get back up the stairs again. You learn a lot about your capacity for badass tenacity that way. Not that I can recommend it, exactly. If you’ve been there, you know what I mean, and I know some readers have been there, are there right now, or are having an even deeper exploration of their capacity to be badass. (Hi, Desolina.)

That said, it was a whole lot more important to me to go up stairs than it is for me to do a perfect front roll. So we’ll see. I figure it’d take eight weeks to get a taste of it; a year to settle in; three years to understand if it’s right for me over the longer term. I’ve done my eight weeks, and I’m ready to try the rest of the year.

Hello, friends! I have not died in a blogging accident or otherwise. It’s just that I’m not really doing anything blog-worthy. But then again, does that stop anybody?

Remember that bug that was going around late last fall that lasted a good three weeks? It took me and my dime-store immune system six weeks to get over it. And in that time I established a good solid list of things I wasn’t getting around to. Now I’ve made a list of those things and am slowly knocking them off, one after another. Grind grind grind.

There was some mildly stressful stuff over the holidays, which put my back muscles into an unhappy state. (Listen, traps, you can’t actually make the furnace work by seizing up. No, seriously.) So Pilates was kind of eh for a couple of weeks — fun and all, and it was helpful with the discomfort, but I wasn’t seeing much progress. But I’m back on track now and working on some relatively strenuous variations of rollbacks and rollups. The rollbacks are pretty challenging for me with my particular pattern of hypo- and hypermobility and pelvic position. And doing a rollup with my hands behind my head is just not happening yet, no matter how much I growl and grit my teeth. I am not a ninja yet. But it’s coming along pretty well. I’m particularly pleased with how well I’ve been keeping my balance and alignment even with various muscles going all snarly.

The weirdest thing I’ve been working on in Pilates is keeping my chest broad while I roll back. It’s automatic to start that pelvic and lumbar curve as if I were a little sowbug, curling the top of my torso along with the bottom of it. It really makes things interesting to try to change that. That’s what I love about Pilates, besides giving it credit for stopping my back pain — you get to think your way through every single movement and really observe carefully what you’re doing, including in areas that aren’t necessarily what you’d consider the focus of the exercise. I can almost feel my brain crackling as it seizes on new variations of movement patterns. The closest thing I can think of in my experience is learning to play the cello. It’s got that degree of physical subtlety.

At the moment, I’m making tortilla soup — essentially this recipe but with more roasted peppers. Smells divine.

I’m getting over one hell of a cold. It may be that standing in the pouring rain shoveling elephant poop is not good for me.

Other than that, I’ve been feeling really good these days. Along with the physical strength and stamina, the neurological stuff’s coming back too — I hardly ever say anything bizarre by accident anymore. No more substituting “mouth dishes” for “teeth” or “time collision” for “scheduling conflict”. I can feel the goo leaving the gears of my mind. Wouldn’t you know it, this is happening just as I’m pretty well losing interest in the life of the mind in favor of more physically grounded pursuits. And I don’t think it’s because the brainwork has gotten easier.

I said to Josh today, “Man, I used to be so abstract and philosophical-like, and now… it’s all about the wool pants and the vegetables and the chickens. But I have the distinct impression that something philosophical is gurgling away in there, informed by the real-world stuff, and that the best way to develop it is to do the real-world stuff.” Maybe in fifteen or twenty years I’ll be all over the mind-body problem or something.