Lair of the Lost Girl

It's almost surreal how decent I feel today, especially given just how invasive the surgery I had was. But I'm recovering from it more smoothly and easily than any of the other (significantly less aggressive) surgeries I've had.

I don't know if this is because they used a different anesthetic protocol, or whether I'm responding better to the new pain meds they prescribed me, or whether I just got unhealthily accustomed to pain in the time leading up to this, but I feel.... if not good, then at least decent.

The nerve problems in my mouth and throat are getting better. I'm still sticking to mostly-soft food, but I can drink water without having to go through ridiculous cautions to avoid drowning myself, and my voice is slowly coming back to normal.

My neck is still stiff, though that's at least in part due to the bandage that gets to come off tonight. And I haven't really had any shoulder pain since I got home. I'm sleeping comfortably, and as long as I'm careful with my posture and keep up with my pain meds, I'm in less pain now than I have been for months.

I can already predict that the biggest challenge for me, over the next few months, is going to be sticking to the restricted activity plan that will keep me healing well. I know it's necessary, but it doesn't feel like it. If I'm this much better now, in a week or two it's going to annoy the everloving daylights out of me to be told that I can't carry a Dutch oven full of beef stew around the kitchen, or start training with hand weights, or pick up my cat.

I'll be good. But it's going to be a struggle. That said, though, if there's a problem to have, there are a lot worse ones than 'feeling too much better too soon...'

Okay. The insurance company finally came through and agreed to cover the surgery, the surgeon's office called to confirm the time and the procedure, and everything seems to be ready to go. Tomorrow at 9:45am I report to the hospital, to have the vertebrae in my neck fused in two places.

I'm as prepared as I can be. I have directions, and medications, and books and shows lined up for my recovery. I've taken all the preparatory steps I can. I just have to pack an overnight bag, take off my jewelry, and take out my contact lenses. Now all that's left for me to do is fidget and fret.

It's fascinating how much preparing for surgery is like preparing for a major religious or magical ritual. I have to cleanse myself, and anoint myself with ritual liquids (chlorhexidine instead of holy water, but still....). I have to purify myself and avoid certain herbs, drugs, and foods for varying periods of time, and there are certain other things I need to take or eat at specific times. I just hope that I have prepared myself adequately, and that the gods of medicine are pleased....

I'll be spending Friday night in the hospital recovering, but if all goes well I should be home and feeling significantly better by Saturday. Here's hoping....

I feel like my life has become rather one-note lately, and that one note has been my health problems. On the other hand, with me mostly not-working (about to become completely not-working) and most of my hobbies taken away by said health problems, I'm having a hard time having much of anything else in my life.

Applying for disability is a fascinating exploration of paperwork at its most complex and gratuitous. I'm not sure why they need to know how much I earned hourly as an official school tutor in 1998, or why they had to ask me three times if I'm blind, or why I could choose American Sign Language as my preferred written language, but if I have to jump through these hoops to stay solvent during my recovery I will.

I'm doing my best not to panic about work. Most of the clinics I work at have been fairly understanding about my extended unavailability, but I can't help but worry that by the time I can work again they will have found other relief vets and won't need me anymore.

Most of all, I'm just trying to come to terms with decreased expectations. I have a strong inner voice yammering that, since I'm not working, I should be able to keep the house clean and do the dishes and get lots of errands run and pick up a few new hobbies and spend lots of time out doing stuff with friends and learn a new language and just generally Do Stuff, and that if I spend a day napping and reading and watching TV that I am somehow failing at making good use of my time.

And this is at odds with the fact that, ultimately, I am in fairly crappy shape, and that on days like today I need to spend my first three hours of consciousness negotiating the war between my head (which is desperately clamoring for liquids to help with the dehydration headache pounding away there) and my stomach (which is asserting that any attempt to ingest anything will be met with refusal and/or violent rebellion).

I want off these meds. I want to feel better. I want to be a person again, not a passive vector for various discomforts....

Apparently it is much harder to deny and/or ignore a stern-voiced male than it is a young-sounding female, especially when that female is doing her best to be as conciliatory as possible after past negative experiences.

After my week of calling and begging and nagging my health providers, umbran took on the task of calling the Pain Management Center for me today. And he pushed and prodded and was stern and persistent at the receptionists until he got them to actually look through my record. And admit that, actually, the doctor *had* answered my question. On Tuesday. And that no one had bothered to relay the message to me, and that apparently the person I had talked to on Wednesday hadn't actually checked before telling me that it hadn't been answered.

(For the record, the support staff at Brigham & Women's Pain Management Clinic are, in my experience, nigh universally.... ungood. I have no idea whether this stems from lack of skill, lack of give-a-damn, or lack of enough bodies to do the work, but ALL of my problems so far have been due to support staff actions.)

And anyway, my doctor there has granted me a referral to a neurosurgeon. Sing hallelujah, praise all the Powers That Be, and let my gratitude be known to all the world.

It's not the finish line - I still need to actually schedule an appointment with said surgeon, which I can't do until I'm officially insured next Tuesday. And the surgeon needs to agree that I'm a valid candidate for surgery, and we need to schedule the procedure. But it's a hell of a lot more than I had yesterday, and a lot faster than I feared, and for that I can't express in words how glad and grateful I am.

First things first - thank you all so much for your support, good wishes, and for reinforcing the fact that the problems I'm going through are neither imaginary nor atypical.

Necondly - I need to sing the praises of both Harvard-Pilgrim Health Care, who got me in with a primary care physician on 48 hours notice and then spent most of the work day hunting down a neurologist outside their network who could see me on an emergency basis when theirs were all overbooked, and Brigham & Women's Hospital, who managed to find me an appointment with a neurologist within 24 hours of being asked.

After meeting with the neurologist today, I feel worlds better, intellectually if not physically. He agrees that, at the moment, the most egregious signs are all medication side effects, and that the best thing for me is just to discontinue all drugs and go back to ibuprofen for pain and inflammation.

The best guess is that my pain and neurological signs stem from a hideous synergism of carpal tunnel syndrome and spinal nerve compression at my C6 vertebra. Unfortunately, without extensive and painful diagnostics, it's impossible to tell what percentage of the signs are from which problem. Current plan is for NSAIDs, wrist brace, and a few months of aggressive PT. If things aren't getting better, or get worse, next step is an MRI, and possible epidural steroid injections.

On the one hand, I'd like an instant cure. On the other hand, this is worlds better than either spinal surgery or staying on these drugs. And at the moment, all I need to do is hang tight until the rest of these poisons are out of my system....

December 3, 2011 - I did my first day of Couch to 5K training. It involved jogging in one-minute intervals, with 90-second breaks in between. I managed it, just barely, and had a crazy stitch in my side by the time I got to the last (9th) interval, and had to walk through a few seconds of it. Total running time: 9 minutes. I felt like I had been beaten with sticks by the end of it.

In between, training was thrown off by gym closures, Norovirus, vacation, and my own nigh-compulsive level of both caution and fear of failure, which led me to go through the training program excruciatingly slowly, ramping up every two weeks instead of every week. I never actually believed at any point that I could make it through, and each time the intensity increased I faced the new challenge with at least some degree of certainty that I would fail, but I was stubborn enough to at least try.

Today? Week 7, Day 1 - I jogged for 25 minutes, no breaks. I know it's been more than seven weeks since December, but still. I can't believe I did this. I can still remember when increasing from 3 minute to 5 minute intervals felt like an insurmountable block. And today? I jogged for almost 25 minutes straight, my only obstacle being the boredom I felt from going around and around and around the same track over and over again. I admit my pace isn't going to set any records, but I did it.

The Run For Your Life is next weekend; I won't be done with the program (and its ultimate goal of 30 minutes running), but I can at least feel like I should be able to make it through - while the course is a full 5K, there are breaks to confront obstacles. And I've made it this far; I'll keep on until I've made it all the way through the 9-week course and can run for a half hour.

Me. Running. I think I spent more time and energy in high school coming up with excuses to not run in gym class than I did on any other one subject.

Huh. Who knew?

Dear Self,

You would do well to remember that, no matter what other form or forms of exercise you may be getting, yoga is still a goodness.

No, it may not burn the most calories, or raise your heart rate or make you sweat, but it is still good for you in more ways than you can count. Especially when you're tense and stressed, and haven't been remembering to stretch as much as you should. Double-especially when you're dealing with panic and nightmares and insomnia.

And don't try to cheat with one of the intense cardio-yoga or power-yoga workouts, either. Stick with the low-key, relaxation and stretching yoga DVD's. It may not feel like exercise, but it will feel GOOD in a way nothing else does, and you will sleep better that night than you have in weeks. Seriously worth it.

Love,
Me

The biggest problem I have to deal with when it comes to my body, in all honesty, is my respiratory system. For all my little (and not-so-little) gripes and grumbles about aesthetics, physically, I'm mostly in decent shape. But a history of allergic bronchitis and a rather foolish incident with walking pneumonia while I was in college have left me with nearly no resistance to any respiratory problems. Whatever illness may be going around any gathering of folks, when it comes to me, I *will* catch it and it *will* turn into bronchitis. It may turn into flu-and-bronchitis, or laryngitis-and-bronchitis, or, as last winter spectacularly demonstrated, flu-and-laryngitis-and-bronchitis, but coughing and wheezing and gasping will always be part of it. And it will almost always take me a month or more to fully recover.

The end result of this is that, whenever I get sick, I wind up spending a month or more unable to exert myself beyond walking across a room without feeling kind of weak and short of breath. And this is beyond a royal nuisance to someone for whom exercise is a vital part of their sanity maintenance program.

When I can't work out, I don't cope as well with the day-to-day stresses of life and the crises that the world loves to throw at me. And when I don't cope well, my basic background levels of worry and panic start to build up. And when those start to grow, old demons suddenly get their claws into my psyche again. Like my body image problems. Which then latch onto the fact that I can't work out.

Lather, rinse, repeat.

And then there are the problems that re-emerge as I start slowly trying to be active again, only to realize that, while I may be feeling better, I'm nowhere near 100% - my lung capacity is still diminished, and a month without practice means at least some lost condition. And I get frustrated, and feel like a failure, and just want to quit. Which is, of course, the stupidest decision possible, but frustration isn't smart.

That's about where I am right now. After a month off the wagon, I've finally, within the past week or so, started to slowly be able to exercise again. And I love it, and I hate it. I love the feeling in my muscles that my body is working. I love getting up off my backside and being mobile. I love the second wind and the sense of accomplishment.

But I hate where I am right now. I hate the fact that the workouts that used to be my easy cop-outs are now challenging, and at the limit of my endurance. I hate the fact that I've had to wimp out and drop back down to my lighter set of weights for strength training. I hate feeling weak and out of shape and lazy and unhealthy and unfit.

I know that if I keep pushing, I'll get back to where I was before. Eventually. But I can't help but feel ashamed of having backslid, and annoyed at having to work back up. Damnit.

(And on a related note, does anybody know of a local-ish gym with an indoor track? If I'm serious about the 5K Run For Your Life I should start practicing, and running outdoors in the winter when I have sensitive airways is a recipe for disaster....)

The most frustrating thing about getting over a hangup, or a fear or anxiety, is the embarrassment and general feeling of foolishness that comes when you realize, in retrospect, just how ungrounded your issues actually were.

That said, I honestly think that the best thing I've done in the past several years, in terms of my physical health, is get over my objections to massage therapy. I'm still grudging in my acceptance of it, but I can no longer deny that it helps, and I'm willing to accept that it's not quite the selfish waste of money I thought it was.

After nearly two weeks of nigh-constant headaches bad enough to leave me in tears, I broke down and scheduled myself another massage at the local parlor. This is the second time I've resorted to that as headache therapy, and... as much as I hate to admit it, it works. Better than anything else I've tried, from hot and cold packs to Tylenol and ibuprofen to backrubs-from-friends. It may not be an instant cure-all, but it takes the pain away for a little while, and makes it a lot easier for everything else to be effective.

And... I like this place, and the people who work there. It doesn't make me feel uncomfortable, or creepy, or needlessly decadent. It just feels like another way to help fight headaches and the nightmares that come when I fall asleep in pain.

So I went, and it helped, and I've even swallowed my pride and my objections and signed up for a monthly plan. With any luck this will help beat the tension down to a level where I might be able to feel my shoulders again, and the headaches will become a thing of the past.

And yeah, all of you guys who told me to get over myself and just accept this as appropriate can now say that you told me so. It still bugs me, and I still feel like a wastrel spendthrift, but... it's working.