Been having chronic back pain lately.
More so that usual, that is. I’ve been experiencing mild back pain ever since around halfway through my second major growth spurt.
The human body is just not designed to be tall, fat, and sedentary.
At least one of those things has got to go.
And I am sure as fuck not going to get any shorter.
Anyhow, yeah, more back pain than usual. As usual, the worst of it comes when I get up from lying down in bed.
That’s when I get that horrible “creaking” feeling in my back like my back is an old rusty hinge accompanied by a terrible and terrifying pain that makes me groan in agony.
The exact location of the pain varies, but it most often comes from in between my shoulder blades all the way down to my midback.
Then afterwards I am sore and stiff in all the muscles that surround my spine and getting painful “aftershocks” in the form of muscle spasms.
It’s not fun.
But it only happens sporadically. Most of the time I can get out of bed and on to my feet without being waylaid by agony.
But when it happens it’s very bad. Bad enough that I am worried that one of these times the pain will be so bad that it makes me fall.
And I am too old and fat and frail for that. A nasty fall could do me in, or at the very least leave me even less functional than now.
Obviously, I should probably bring this to the attention of a medical professional. And I totally will do so after I have tried a few things to maybe handle it myself.
Like very carefully stretching my back. You know, taking it slow and gentle so as not to end up throwing my back out in the process of trying to fix it.
Massage is also a possibility. Kind of hard for me to reach the area most involved, but I can manage if I just use this big bad brain of mine.
If I had more money, I would get a professional massage. In fact, if I had mucho dinero, I would get a professional massage like twice a day.
From my own personal masseur. A hulking dude with a gentle smile and rippling muscles and big, strong hands.
But I am poorer than most dirt, so I will have to DIY it.
The good news, or at least the less terrible news, is that the pain has not been in the area of my back with the hairline fracture. That fracture is on my L4 vertebra, which is the second one from the bottom of your spine.
In other words, the fracture is much lower on my spine than the pain.
Still, it’s a worrying development. Seems like the universe never runs out of new and inventive ways to fuck me over.
Guess I will just have to get better at handling the unexpected instead of always running to stand still.
In other words, working extremely hard to try to keep things the same.
Fuck that. It’s a losing strategy. I am not saying you have to surrender all control and become one with the chaos or whatever, but you are far better off accepting that you will always be subjected to factors beyond your control that severely limit your ability to control what happens to you, so emotionally investing in controlling outcomes is a fool’s bet and you are better off investing in your ability to cope with whatever.
Shit happens. And it always will. So learn to deal with it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.
You did what now?
Here’s something to send to a friend who is in an important meeting or at a funeral :
I have to admire their commitment to making something really offensive.
That takes craftmanship!
The latest scoop
BROWN ALERT. The following contains explicit poop talk.
So I had another attack of sleep incontinence.
The disgustingly ironic bit is that it happened in two stages. At some point in my night’s sleep, I woke up enough to notice that there was a lot of some kind of liquid on the bed.
Even mostly asleep I had an inkling of where it might have come from. And that’s the same place that guy above glued his balls to.
So I mopped it up with whatever scrappable (and crappable) paper I had lying around and went back to sleep.
And it wasn’t until I woke up in the morning in the clear light of day and my brain fully booted up until it occurred to me that there was probably a solid portion too.
And yup. There it was on my poor beleaguered comforter than has not been washed for like a decade, a whole lot of my poop.
At least, I assume it was mine.
So I cleaned that up with a bunch of Kleenex. Took care of it myself because I would die of shame three times over if I had to make Julian do it.
And he’d probably die twice, poor dear.
As always, I am not going to sound the alarm unless it happens again. Right now, my position is that this seems to be something my body needs to do every once in a while and as it is not accompanied by any other symptoms – no stomach cramping, black tarry feces, feeling faint, or anything else of that nature – I am not going to push the alarm button just yet.
But if it happens again, or I find myself unable to pee, I am going to have to go to the ER or worse, Urgent Care.
Because like I have said before, I was told by an ER doctor that if I experience either incontinence or an inability to pee, I should go straight to the ER.
And yeah. If I found myself unable to pee, I would definitely go straight to the ER because that’s a ticking time bomb and when that bomb goes off my bladder explodes and holy crap would that be BAD.
The whole “only if it happens twice” rule is my own modification to the incontinence half of the equation, based on a) not wanting to go to the ER because the ER sucks donkey taint, but more logically b) the number of times I have had an attack like this and then was totally fine afterwards, thus indicating that a trip to the ER was not necessary.
And if it’s not necessary, I ain’t going. See part a) for why.
The weirdest part of these attacks (warning : intimacy level spike) is that my butthole ends up feeling really, really dilated.
Like something is holding it painfully open. Like retractors or something.
Which makes me wonder, am I pooping myself, or is it just… falling out?
Like, is this a bowel problem, or a sphincter problem?
The anal sphincter is a muscle, after all, and I have muscle issues.
Please, God, don’t make me have to wear adult diapers.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.