Selenay's Ramblings

Yesterday was the fabulous work "celebrate success" day. Our director likes to do these every now and again because so many of my colleagues come from consulting backgrounds and miss the perks that consulting used to give them. It's also a chance for the director to point out how much money his development teams have saved the company. My little analysis and reporting team just goes for the free food and drink ;-)

Anyway, it was yesterday. We went into London for the do, going to Brown's in Covent Garden for lunch. I took the sensible precaution of leaving the office early, driving to a train station near home and travelling in from there to meet them all. Last time I left the car at the office and was then faced with a long, traffic-filled drive home after a long day in London. Not fun.

Lunch was very long because the restaurant took rather a long time to serve the food - we didn't finish until 4pm having arrived at 12.30pm! Thankfully there was no assigned seating thing this time so I got to sit with colleagues that I actually know and like, rather than contractors that I'd never met before. I also got to know a couple of people that I haven't been able to chat to before. The food was pretty 'meh' but the company was good, making lunch very entertaining. When we were finally done, there were the usual patting the other teams on the backs speeches and then we got on with the 'fun' activity portion of the day.

This time, it wasn't a treasure hunt with impenetrable clues. Nor was I in my director's team. Both factors made it a much more fun activity. We got split into teams (making sure all the usual friendly groups got split up) and each team was set the task of recreating, in five photos, a famous movie. In fact, the thing bore a startling resemblance to Wobblevision. Except I'm sure none of my colleagues have been to Redemption...

Thankfully my team got assigned a movie with a couple of fairly iconic scenes that were easy to recreate, so when we have to play guess the movie next week we should do OK. We also managed to complete it in around 40 minutes, arriving at the pub nice and early :-))

I had planned to leave after the commuter rush on the train, but ended up not leaving until 9pm! It was fun, though, and I enjoyed getting to know people better. I even found that one of the new chaps is a fellow book geek. And as my colleagues got more drunk, they got even funnier ;-)

The downside was that I totally overdid things, including standing to talk with people for a couple of hours, so by the time I got home my back was killing me. Bleh. I finally gave up on undrugged sleep at around 2am and took some painkillers which knocked me out. In fact, I then slept so well that I missed my hairdresser's appointment! So I've had to rebook it for next week - my hairdresser is lovely and knows that I'm only late or fail to turn up if it's something really bad, so she called when I was ten minutes late to check on me and fitted me in next week. Phew!

I now feel like a complete zombie, so I really need to wake up a bit so that I can do some college work, which is the plan I set myself for this weekend. First, though, I'm going to eat some soup for lunch.

I haven't babbled about back and hip pain for a while and, while I dislike being all "woe is me" here, I thought an updatey thing might be appropriate seeing as I saw the doctor again last night.

The main headline news? This is as good as it's likely to get :-( Between the horse pills and the acupuncture, I'm now at a bearable level most of the time and the docs all agree that it's not going to get better than that. And the bad days are just going to be bad. Gah.

The doc has reviewed my medication and deemed that it's not killing or damaging me, so I'm probably safe to continue doing what I'm doing. We could change to a different med if it was producing side-effects, but there's no way to know whether a different one would work as well and I'm feeling fine. He suggested a low-dose anti-depressant to possibly improve my sleep, but then checked my records and decided that we won't pursue that due to the severe side-effects whenever we've tried that before :-) His only concern is that I could develop resistance to the meds - a particular concern when I'm so young and could need them for many years - but we'll deal with that when it happens.

For now, I'm doing everything that he could have suggested so we'll see how things go and monitor me. I discussed non-drug methods of pain control, in particular whether I'd get any benefit from a TENS machine. Although he doesn't think it could replace what I'm on, he thinks it could be useful for additional pain-relief on the bad days and he'll apparently be interested to know how I get on with it. He's never had a chronic pain patient use one so this could be an interesting experiment. Mom and I are now researching in hopes of finding something suitable before the Canada trip.

And I am now a chronic pain patient on my medical notes. Yay me :-)

Guess it's time to look into registering as disabled for Peg Two next year.

The good news is that all the bones in my back are in the right place. The specialist seemed to have great fun - he's never had a patient with the degree of hypermobility I have before so he spent a lot of the examination saying "Wow, bendy!"

He was also a little stunned by the family history and all the potential things I could have inherited - ankylosing spondilitis on both sides and, on my mother's side, osteogenesis imperfecta. The OI is rare enough that he's never seen a case outside of his medical text books so I think talking to a family with two sufferers was rather cool for him. Mom came in with me for moral support (and so that I'd actually remember what I had to tell him) so he got a little side-tracked asking her about the OI :-)

We took some X-rays because, due to the hypermobility, I'm at increased risk of certain bones in the spine being displaced. Thankfully, they're all where they should be. So that's definitely a positive. He's pretty sure that the dysplasia in my hips is also a result of the hypermobility.

The bad news is that there is no definite diagnosis. Despite the pain, there are no neurological issues which rules out disc problems and diseases such as MS. He's currently thinking that it's muscular and getting the pain sorted should allow the muscles to heal. To that end, I've been banned from doing the physio exercises and told not to overdo things. Go back to work if the back feels better, stay home if it doesn't. I've got a new set of painkillers to replace the ones that I'd been taking with no result and he's referring me for acupuncture. I'm due to see him in two weeks so that we can review my progress.

So, although there's no definite diagnosis, at least he's showing a positive interest in getting the pain under control and trying to fix me, which is rather a relief. I'll just have to see how this next phase pans out :-)

Yesterday was my worst day yet, pain-wise, so I finally gave up and called in sick today. I went up to see the doctor (not the Doctor, just a doctor...) and I'll be self-certifying myself as sick for the rest of the week. If things haven't improved I'll be going back to her to get a sick note on Monday.

( More detailed boring stuff behind the cut, wherein I report on specialists and physios )

Guess I need to find some happier distractions to make the time go faster until Friday. And try not to get too darned intimidated by the specialist when I finally see him.

At work and feeling blah. Stayed home yesterday because my back seemed rather more painful than normal, but felt better last night so I came in today. Possibly not sensible. It's starting to look like I might have to find out from a doctor whether there is anything actually wrong and get a definite diagnosis this time. Ick. Really don't like doctors.

In other news, Da's 'sprained' ankle has turned out to be broken. He went up to the hospital for an x-ray yesterday "just in case" and returned with crutches and a cast. He's very, very unhappy about this concept. Particularly the bit where he's not allowed to put weight on the broken ankle and must actually use the crutches. Aw.

Thankfully Mom is fine because otherwise we'd be a household in trouble.

I want to find things to squee about, but I'm coming up blank. I did vegetate in front of a ridiculously bad disaster movie yesterday - 'Terror Peak'. It was really bad. Thankfully, it made it into the 'so bad it's actually quite fun' category, rather than shooting out into the unwatchable state. Not quite in 'Volcano: Fire on the Mountain' territory, but still an entertaining way to spend an afternoon :-)