Selenay's Ramblings

I think the house misses Mum and is throwing a hissy fit over her leaving. On Saturday:

1) A piece of lining from under the eaves started to depart from the house
2) The thermostat in the living room quarter of the house packed up.

I've got someone coming out to look at the heating today (phew!) but I'm struggling to find anyone who can help me with the eaves issue. It just needs a guy with a long ladder, a hammer and some nails but do you think anyone will come out for a ten minute job like that? I've tried a couple of church contacts who have failed to show up when promised so it looks like I'm ringing round the church and neighbours again tonight.

Just to make this even better, I dislocated a rib again on Saturday and I discovered both of the above issues just as I was planning to veg out with muscle relaxants and the TV. Double argh.

The rib has relocated and is feeling much better. It's not fun being unable to breathe without extreme pain. Tonight I may even try the 'sleeping without muscle relaxants' thing.

Please let this be it for house problems this winter?

It took me an hour (due to editing twice, once for a forgotten shout out to my beta in notes and once due to not formatting some italics) but I have posted my yuletide fic.

This is mainly because the archive will be insane tomorrow (worse than today, if that's believable) and I don't want to panic about not being able to post before the deadline. It's editable so if my beta comes back with big red scrawls over the second draft that I sent, I can still correct and amend, but at least it's there and I feel fairly happy with it.

Also, if the physio kills me tomorrow it's also there.

I have got physio for 8am. As physio at 8am on Friday was a disaster due to me being incredibly stiff and immovable, I'm thinking that tomorrow may also be a Bit Of An Issue.

Note to self: book physio for afternoons in future when the morning stiffness has decreased and you're 'just' suffering from too much sitting down.

Today my back woke me up at 4am (after not going to sleep until after midnight) to inform me that we were done with lying down now. I was stubborn and stayed in bed, propped into semi-less-uncomfortable positions with pillows. It wasn't a good morning and I am so incredibly tired right now.

My back is following the familiar old pattern: not feeling too bad in the morning, which fools me into thinking it will be fine so I toddle off to work, getting worse through the day until I'm close to crippled in the evening. Argh. It's hard to decide to call in sick when you're feeling fairly OK first thing and the bad point doesn't start to hit until mid-morning.

The only good thing is that I'm familiar with this and know how to manage it. NSAIDs, heat pads (to relax the muscles that tense up from the pain of the inflammation), TENS machine, plenty of movement and definitely not just doing nothing. I am going to be lazy in the kitchen for the next few days, planning meals that require minimal tending so that I don't end up half-crippled by the time I'm ready to eat. Long periods of standing tend to aggravate my back just as badly as long periods of sitting.

I'll give this treatment plan a week and then, if it's not getting better by early next week, I shall take myself to the doctor to get checked out. Hopefully they'll be amenable to an X-ray (to confirm that the inflammation around my spine is back), more NSAIDs (I run out of celebrex in two weeks) and a referral back to a rheumy seeing as this is usually put down to the EDS. I'll do physio if they insist, but past experience has shown that physios generally don't know what to do with me and end up giving me the same core stability exercises that the previous three physios have given me. They're more used to dealing with people whose problems are routed in poor posture and inflexibility. Me being hypermobile rather defeats them because my range of movement, even when I'm in this state and stiffer than normal, is better than a normal person's ROM.

Getting checked by the docs is mainly to confirm that this isn't something new and different and also have a supply of NSAIDs. I've been on this merry-go-round for long enough to realize that it's unlikely anyone will figure out why I keep getting inflammation around my spine.

Well, we'll see how it goes. At least I know more about what's happening this time. And I can educate my doctors. Um. Yeah. No, still struggling with the silver lining to this.

Tomorrow is going to be interesting. I've got a four hour meeting to attend. It's in a convention suite at a hotel down the street from my office, which means that it's going to be four hours on exceedingly uncomfortable chairs in an overly air-conditioned room with terrible sandwiches for lunch. On a good day, that kind of thing makes my back unhappy. We have this meeting every six months and I was nearly crippled after the last one.

Right now?

I'm pretty sure that I won't get through it. So I've already warned the boss that I'll be either working from home or calling in sick tomorrow to escape it, depending on how bad I feel by this evening. A day at home is probably what I need anyway and it would be more productive than attending the meeting and being off for the rest of the week. So I'll see how I feel and make a judgement call tomorrow morning on whether I work from home or just give in and spend the day knitting, watching TV and taking lots of gentle walks around the garden.

Somehow, I sprained my knee in the night. I'm pretty sure it didn't dislocate (I normally notice that), but it is taking great objection to bearing weight, bending and straightening, stairs and hills.

Argh.

It's much more comfortable if I used my cane and I'm smart enough to know that these things don't heal if I abuse them. Double argh.

I had errands to run today. Many errands. When I'm having to use my cane, several things are firmly pointed out to me:

1) The world is designed for people with two free hands
2) Being a cripple makes you invisible
3) Stores filled with people because it's six weeks to Christmas are not possible to negotiate if you're a cripple

By the time I got home, I hated most of humanity. But! I had fresh fruit and veg, some yummy sausages, some outdoor Christmas lights, a tree for my aunt and a present for a friend's baby. I was also able to deposit some money in the bank and I have no officially saved up for an iPod Touch. That I am still debating. Oh, silly indecisive brain. I want one and I've saved for it, but what if I need that money later?

Shortly, I am going out with my aunt to eat Thai food and then watch the new Harry Potter. Obviously I am not excited about this at all because that would be just childish.

...

Squeeee!

This morning I started out tired, grouchy and achy. I seriously contemplated just staying in bed for a while, but forced myself up and out.

You can imagine how impressed I was to discover that parking barriers have been added to my work car park and the design is so good that everyone has to get out of their cars to swipe their cards. Gah! I cannot get my car close enough to have any hope of reaching it, nor can anyone else, and I can already tell that this is going to be miserable in the rain or, even better, in the winter with snow and ice everywhere. The traffic jams at busy times will be awesome.

I swear to god, I shall deliberatly fall and dislocate something if the barriers haven't been changed by winter, just to prove what a stupid idea the design is.

Anyway, I was so pissed off that I sent a note to the director of corporate affairs who had the misfortune to have sent an email about our beautiful new parking barriers last night. Nothing will come of it, but I have to try...

Yesterday I got a headset for my phone. The OT has gone a little overboard in sending me equipment - I get perhaps two phone calls a week. Yes, I do tuck the phone between shoulder and ear so that I can type and talk, but for one or two calls a week? Anyway, I'm quite excited and just waiting for someone to phone me so that I can use it. Come on phone, ring!

Today another new piece of equipment arrived. It was a little less successful. The basic idea is genius: a wrist rest that incorporates a roller bar and buttons to act as a mouse. Genius! My arms need never twist in awkward directions to get to my mouse again! Er, except that I can't have both it and my keyboard on my keyboard tray at once. It's going to go back and they'll get me a trackball instead. I need something because my keyboard tray does not make mouse usage easy, but as brilliant as this contraption is (and it really is brilliant, I must say) it's not quite practical with the keyboard tray that the OT requested.

Still, it's quite nice that her recommendations are being followed up. Wonder when my new chair will get here?

The good news is that my aunt is moved, almost all her belongings are in her new apartment and nothing got broken in transit. When I left, most of her stuff was piled in approximately the rooms it will stay in and most of the furniture was in peices, but she had a bed, a chair and a kitchen table with chairs so she's sorted. Plus her telephone, TV and Internet were all hooked up without problems on Saturday so communications are a go.

It's going to take her a while to get everything sorted out, unpacked, constructed and set up. She's got a fair bit of sorting through and chucking out still to do because her ex-housemate ensured that she didn't have time to do any packing last week. This is also the reason why some of her stuff is still at the house. Sadly, that means the ex-housemate will be getting her to do 'little jobs' (hmm) for her every time my aunt goes over to pick things up. Damn.

Still, considering how hard the ex-housemate was working to ensure that the move didn't happen and how determined she was that most of our time would be spent rearranging her stuff in the space my aunt has vacated, it wasn't too bad.

The bad news is that I spent a lot of the weeekend working remotely when I wasn't moving my aunt. This is because our big month end jobs ran over the weekend, I was the contact for it and everything that could go wrong, did go wrong. My boss told me that it went pretty smoothly, she thought. Um, hello?

The biggest frustration of the weekend happened around 6am Sunday morning. I was totally shattered when I finally crawled home Saturday night (9.30pm) but still had to sit up doing some work stuff for an hour. After that, I made some cocoa to relax myself a bit before trying to sleep and took some painkillers.

Apparently I got too relaxed. I vaguely remember something painful happening to my knee, but at 6am I woke up with a cat crying outside the door and a dead foot. My knee dislocated while I was sleeping. Thankfully I was still so dopey and relaxed that it went back easily and I drifted off to sleep again, ignoring the cat. She was probably wondering why I was still asleep, OMG, it's 6am! I managed to sleep until my alarm went off at 8am and did some more work from my bed before going off for the final round of moving stuff. And then I did another hour of work when I got home. Bleh. My knee actually feels pretty OK now, just stiff if I sit too long, but the disturbed night and the necessity to get up and work when I'd planned to sleep in a bit did not make me happy particularly as it was due to someone else's mistake.

Now I'm at work in my office, feeling exceedingly tired with a monster headache. Unfortunately I have some work-ish stuff to do when I get home, but I plan on getting that out of the way and then having an early night.

I'm very pissed off that right now I've had three dislocations and one sprain and it's only the beginning of May. Last year, I managed one dislocation and no sprains all year. WTF?

( Cut for whining )

I picked up a copy of the season opener for Lewis and watched it last night. It's really quite good, isn't it? Why did no one tell me that it's quite good?

Also, House was rather awesome :-)

Note to self: substituting a fair bit of the cheddar for stilton in cauliflower cheese is a very good idea. Nom. However, about half the quantity of cauliflower cheese would have been better. How did it multiply? I'm sure I used the same quantities of everything that I normally do, and yet I had about double the normal amount. It was quite excellent but, er, rather more filling than it should have been and I'm not sure how good re-heated cauliflower cheese would have been.

Also, please to be remembering that preparing food with sore shoulder is not easy.

Tonight's veggie curry has been replaced with beef stroganoff because I had some in the freezer and thus it simply requires reheating, a spoonful of sour cream added and some noodles cooked. Yes, lazy, but I'm not feeling like spending time cooking today :-)

I believe that I have identified the source of all that pain I had Thursday evening/Friday.

Sometime during Wednesday night I dislocated my left shoulder blade, trapping a nerve and straining the muscles and tendons in the area.

How did I know this? Well, on Friday afternoon I was trying to stretch and mobilise the shoulder so that I didn't have cramped, spasming muscles to add to the problem and there was this moment where the shoulder blade made a nasty klunk-crunch sound and some of the pain started to ease off.

Yeah, I was walking around with a dislocation for thirty-six hours. No wonder it was so painful! And, um, it isn't the first time that I've dislocated things in my sleep.

Anyway, there is still some pain under and around the shoulder blade when move in certain ways or when I don't move and things stiffen up (I suspect the nerve is bruised and things were strained by being out of place for so long), but I'm much more comfortable than I was and I even managed to get out and about a bit yesterday, although I couldn't get my winter tires changed because I couldn't lift my all-seasons into the car. That has been re-scheduled for two weeks time.

I gave in and signed off about half an hour after making my LJ post on Friday because it had got too painful. In retrospect, it was probably stupid to try to work that day. I am comforting myself with the knowledge that even if I'd gone to the doctor there wasn't much should could have done other than send me to a physio for manipulation or possibly tell me to see my specialist. And as I reset everything Friday afternoon, it would have been a wasted trip :-)

Today has been a beautiful day. I actually went out without my big winter coat and took a walk on the boardwalk after church, because it was so beautiful and I love the smell of the sea. It makes up for a sucky Friday and almost makes up for missing my knitting group on Thursday. It's going to rain for the next couple of days, but it's not snow and that continues to make me happy :-)

My body has been so well behaved these last few months that I'd almost forgotten what it could do.

Damn.

My back isn't actually excruciating yet, but I can feel pressure, inflammation and discomfort there. It's not pleasant and it's promising to get worse. Put together with pain in hips and knees, and the pain that's just starting to run up and down my legs probably from the inflammation flare-up in the back, and today is going to be miserable.

And it's only 6.30am. Anyone want to shoot me now?

This morning was incredibly cold. We're talking so cold that I coughed every time I took a breath outside, that cold. I seem to be handling the cold better than the snow, though.

That's not the point of the story.

It's going to be a clear day and I'd forgotten just how beautiful the day can be when it's crisp and cold. Then I got to the end of my road, looked down towards the ocean and saw the thick layer of sea mist out there. It was amazing, this cloud of white mist that drifted and shifted only a few feet over the sea. I wish that I'd had my camera and a few minutes to photograph it.

***

In other news, my back is playing up :-( I didn't do anything special to it last night, I had a comfortable seat at knit night and yet by the time I went to bed it was throbbing and hurting. If my rheumy X-rayed me right now, I'm sure that a ton of inflammation would show up, it was that kind of pain. Unfortunately, that meant I didn't really drop off to sleep until 2am and my alarm goes off at 5.45am. Yeah, I feel good.

I did get the heating set a bit better last night. I left it a degree higher in the main house than I usually did and pushed the dial up a little in my room, so I wasn't frozen when I woke up and it wasn't completely unpleasant when I got out of bed. Heating will resume normal status when the weather warms up a bit, but I was so glad this morning that I'd done that.

And now I shall go and take some painkillers and get on with my work.