Pain

Yeah, pain.  John Cougar was full of shit when he claimed it "Hurt So Good".

(yeah I know what the song is about, just saying is all)

About 2 weeks before the LAN last month my ankle started hurting, and within the week it was swollen to about half the size of my head (I only wish I was exagerating) and I wound up in the ER on a Friday night getting treated for what the attending described as gouty arthritis,  That cleared up, and about 2 weeks ago my back tightened up like I had funny or something.

Now, you know when you get an ache or a pain (especially if its something you've had before), and you dismiss it as something that will go away on its own soon enough?  I do that too.  Only problem is any more its not going away, it just gets worse to the point its deabilitating.  Like this back tweak.

Its gotten to the point where not only does the back hurt on the right side, my entire right side of my ass hurts and it runs down to my knee, focusing on the top of my calf and running down to my ankle.  And I mean fuck, it hurts bad.  Its why I've hardly been posting the last couple weeks, why I haven't been on Live much.  I had to cancel this weekend's visitation with my son because I can barely handle driving for 10 minutes to get to work, let alone the 7 hour round trip to pick my boy up.  I feel like a jackass at work because a month ago I was on crutches with my ankle, and now I'm hobbled with the back.  My boss was trying to get me to take a few days off and I wouldn't.  I can still get the job done and we have new people that need to be trained, so I'm not missing.  Plus I'm still working towards my goal of 1 year + with no call-offs, which I will make at the end of October.

Anyway, back to the point.  If there is a point, I mean this is kind of rambling and I don't even know why I'm blogging about it.  Its kind of hard dealing with this because not only is it hard to be practically immobile while you live alone, but the pain from my gout incident drove me to the brink of what I can handle and this is pushing me over it.  I have a high threshhold for pain, very high.  Between 3 shoulder and 2 knee surgeries, an already messed up back (bulging/degenerative L5), and about half a dozen sublexed ribs I am always hurting to some degree.

So this weekend I've pretty much spent in bed.  Oh, one thing I figured was that my shoes were old and kind of broken up (which they were) so I figured I was not only not getting good support from them, but it was probably causing or exasperating the problem.  So I went out and got new shoes this morning (payday last Friday ftw!) and stopped off at the EB over there and chatted with the manager.  He's a big dude too, and it turns out he had exactly the same type of problem about a month ago.  It was kind of funny because he was mentioning all the symptoms, and how if you did this or that it sometimes felt better, but if you did something else it made it worse...exactly the same as with me  He thought he had blown a disc, and with his wife being a nurse she took him to the hospital she worked at and had him x-rayed.  No disc problems.  So he went and saw a doc, turns out it was what was described as a "long-term back spasm".  So he told me about these stretches the doc had him do and how Icy-Hot helped him.  So I've been doing those stretches, and they do help, but it makes the muscles hurt even worse a bit later since they're being used like that.

So I've spent today in bed, stretching, sleeping, and rubbing icy-hot on my ass.  Beat that, all you single guys!

Its amazing how much everything has gone to shit from a health perspective since I turned 40 in June.