Catching up on life
I took some time off from work today to have lunch with my oldest friend. Have known her for more than half my life, almost two thirds (next year) , since we were in college. It was an almost-a-month-late birthday lunch (mine). We picked the same thing off the Sweetwater Taven menu, a divine salad, grilled sushi grade tuna (mine was rare) with lettuce, dates, dried cranberries, pine nuts, pickled ginger, goat cheese, some of those crunchy asian noodles you get with take out wonton soup, and a champagne citrus dressing. Sublime. Talked for 2 hours, catching up on this and that, all the drama in our lives. Plotted a rite of passage this summer for my goddaughter who will be starting middle school. What a wonderful mom Deb is! And why didn't my mom understand that things like contact lenses and plucked eyebrows, mascara and lip gloss would have changed my life? Somehow I think it would have made a difference in a world where standing out is so not cool.
Ended the afternoon in a visit to my physiatrist, the MD on my solve-the-back-pain team. I am working hard with two PT sessions weekly, usually two hours each, and a torturous deep tissue massage once a week that usually reduces me to tears at least once. My miracle workers have me so flexible that for the first time in my life, ever, I can bend down with straight knees and touch the floor. And it's more than fingertips grazing the floor. But I still hurt most of the time and the pain exhausts me. It doesn't help my depression (that I can't always shake off even with the drugs). A few nights ago I went to bed in tears, inconsolable I was hurting so much. Today is a little better, not much. So what did the good doctor do when she saw me today? We tried a trigger point injection last month, it was supposed to help my muscles in the thoracic spine area relax. This month she decided we would try for a more agressive solution. So she will do a stereotaxic (to help her locate the exact spot) injection of BOTOX! Who knew that slightly paralyzing the muscle would help it to relax and learn how to behave? Oh I hope this works.... More on this after we do it.
Chronic illness is a bitch. When I was struggling with adult onset asthma years ago (from the "sick building" I worked in) I began to see how difficult it is to negotiate the medical system without an advoacte, how depressing it can be to not get solutions that work, to be treated like a moron by physicians who think I can't understand the statistics reported in the PDR because I don't have the allmighty MD after my name. I learned a lot about the importance of working with physicians who are good communicators and the perils of dealing with HMO physicians. (I was once diagnosed with a brain tumor over the phone by a doctor I had never met because he refused to believe that the dizziness I was experiencing could be caused by the drug his colleague had prescribed. And didn't suggest I come in to get it checked out!)
Now I deal with something different. The demon my friend with RA has been battling for fifteen years has come to stay in my house - chronic pain. I now understand why she has days when she has no energy for getting out of bed. I am going to continue to work on this -- my goal is to boot that stinker out of my house and return to being the cheerful playful woman poor Bruce married nearly eight years ago.
Ended the afternoon in a visit to my physiatrist, the MD on my solve-the-back-pain team. I am working hard with two PT sessions weekly, usually two hours each, and a torturous deep tissue massage once a week that usually reduces me to tears at least once. My miracle workers have me so flexible that for the first time in my life, ever, I can bend down with straight knees and touch the floor. And it's more than fingertips grazing the floor. But I still hurt most of the time and the pain exhausts me. It doesn't help my depression (that I can't always shake off even with the drugs). A few nights ago I went to bed in tears, inconsolable I was hurting so much. Today is a little better, not much. So what did the good doctor do when she saw me today? We tried a trigger point injection last month, it was supposed to help my muscles in the thoracic spine area relax. This month she decided we would try for a more agressive solution. So she will do a stereotaxic (to help her locate the exact spot) injection of BOTOX! Who knew that slightly paralyzing the muscle would help it to relax and learn how to behave? Oh I hope this works.... More on this after we do it.
Chronic illness is a bitch. When I was struggling with adult onset asthma years ago (from the "sick building" I worked in) I began to see how difficult it is to negotiate the medical system without an advoacte, how depressing it can be to not get solutions that work, to be treated like a moron by physicians who think I can't understand the statistics reported in the PDR because I don't have the allmighty MD after my name. I learned a lot about the importance of working with physicians who are good communicators and the perils of dealing with HMO physicians. (I was once diagnosed with a brain tumor over the phone by a doctor I had never met because he refused to believe that the dizziness I was experiencing could be caused by the drug his colleague had prescribed. And didn't suggest I come in to get it checked out!)
Now I deal with something different. The demon my friend with RA has been battling for fifteen years has come to stay in my house - chronic pain. I now understand why she has days when she has no energy for getting out of bed. I am going to continue to work on this -- my goal is to boot that stinker out of my house and return to being the cheerful playful woman poor Bruce married nearly eight years ago.
posted by Barbara Muth at 5:56 PM
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