I originally was going to say “Pain management edition” after the colon but I decided this was funnier.
And I always go with the funny. Or most poignant. Or scariest.
Whatever will have the greatest emotional impact, I suppose.
Anyhow, this is a story all about how I screwed up big and then I said “Ow!”.
See, I had Wound Care this morning. Wound Care on a Saturday is weird, I know, but this is not the first time it’s happened.
The schedule just works out that way sometimes. And it’s no big deal to come in on the weekend. It just means I have to be buzzed in.
Kind of like when delivery people deliver to us, come to think of it.
Anyhow, this morning’s Wound Care was extra stressful, because I screwed up and totally forgot I had something to do and was treating today like any other Saturday morning until I suddenly woke up from a solid snooze and remembered.
And that was at 9:22 am, and my appointment was at 9:45 am.
Um…GO TIME.
We ended up getting there pretty much exactly on time. Bravo us!
But there was a hidden cost to our victory that soon raised its ugly head : because I’d had to rush out the door without eating breakfast, I also had rushed out the door without taking my morning dose of good ol Gabapentin.
So today’s trip to Wound Care involved a lot of pain for me. Trolleying along with my walker had not hurt that bad since I first got out of the hospital in August of ’22.
And even then, the pain was not as acute.
Basically, everything between my waist and my knees hurt. Especially my hips.
Oy, the pain in my hips. I felt it in the muscles and the tendon, and even in the bone. And that pain radiated inwards towards my core.
Luckily, it did not make it to my no-no area. Small mercies.
So yeah. Today’s Wound Care trip hurt one hell of a lot.
Oh well, won’t make that mistake again. Would have only taken a moment or two to take my Gabapentin on the way out of the door. Next time I will think of that.
Ya know, sometimes I think that the main way we get wiser as we get older is by making a lot of dumb mistakes when we are younger.
Then you have a benighted soul like myself who cleverly refused to participate in adult reality and therefore did not make any of those oh so important mistakes when I was younger, or really at all, and as a consequence I am fifty years old and don’t know shit.
Oh, I am brilliantly intelligent and have vast amounts of extremely deep insight into how things really work and how to make them work better. I’m a wizard on that level.
But that’s brain knowledge. That’s knowledge without true understanding.
Sure, my brain knows a lot of things, but my soul is practically retarded.
We need a good word for this other kind of knowledge, the kind that can only come from experience and the kind of neural pathways experience brings.
Because it’s rather important. And the natural progression of the highly intelligent people (nerds) blinds them to its very existence.
But if you have ever wondered why people far stupider than you do oh so much better in life than you, that’s why.
They might have barely graduated from high school, but their seemingly sheeplike ability to just do what everyone else is doing without thinking about it has actually given them far more practical, unconscious wisdom than your brains ever will.
You’re better at math, they’re better at life.
Kind of feels like school taught you to value all the wrong things, dunnit?
More after the break.
It doesn’t work like that!
So both my hips are hurting now. Especially the left one.
The left one hurts all the way around the hip joint and into my back pocket, and I can feel something shifting and grinding in the socket.
And that fucking hurts.
And a weird thing did happen at Wound Care : the nurse had me hold my left leg in a certain position that to me seemed perfectly safe but soon the muscles of my left leg started to protest.
Ya know. By hurting. As opposed to via a strongly worded letter to the editor.
But that’s not the weird part. Practically anything that requires me to sit in a position other than one in which my legs are perfectly straight (sic) and therefore puts strain on my tender tendons causes me some amount of pain.
There’s been times when just having my foot up on the stool at Wound Care in slightly the wrong way has caused a lot of pain.
And yet, I am still too timid to tell the nurse, “Hey, this hurts! I need to move!”.
Anyhow, the weird part was that the tendons on my RIGHT leg started to hurt too. The ones directly across from the ones hurting on the left leg.
I guess they ARE all kind of strung together, so it makes sense, but at the time I really had the feeling that the universe was really piling on to me.
And then my hip and associated bits kept hurting even after I took my goddamned Gabapentin! And that suggests that the lack of Gabapentin this morning somehow damaged my muscles.
But that doesn’t make sense. Pain doesn’t cause injuries. Injuries cause pain!
Best I can figure is that my Gabapentin has been hiding a hell of a lot more pain than I thought it was. So much so, in fact, that one standard dose (200 mg) was not enough to put the pain back to sleep.
And now the hip pain is teaming up with the back pain and that whole part of my body shifts and grinds and hurts when I move.
I might have to up my Gabapentin dose again.
Or I might be even more disabled than before now. I did have an attack of flu-like symptoms last weekend. Maybe that was another attack of whatever mysterious ailment has been fucking up my muscles.
I know that since last weekend, my arms are getting tired a lot faster than before. They are almost as bad as my legs for that now.
That wheelchair is coming for me. I just know it.
I will talk to you nice people again tomorrow.