life: January 2008 archives


With Even More Unrelenting

[ rakaur on Tue Jan 29 at 10:11 PM // category: health, life, pain ]

The spasms the other night finally slowed down after the Flexeril kicked in. Now I have a pain problem.

I’m not sure if I did something specific to make things worse, but the pain’s been ungodly the last three days. The first day I figured was a bad day, and let it go. Yesterday I attributed to sitting in crappy chairs at school all day, and let it go. Today I have no excuse for. It started hurting almost as soon as I woke up. It felt a little better when I got to work, and then quickly started hurting worse.

I’m having trouble describing the pain even more now than before. There’s still the dull ache in the low back, tail bone area, but it’s been feeling as if it’s climbing up my spine. Any time I try to bend over my back screams in agony and it feels like my spine can’t bend anymore. It’s like taking your open palm and being unable to make a closed fist with your fingers. Something holds them back. There’s just a painful stiffness.

I’ve been hoping every minute of the last 72 hours that it’s just been a bad day and tomorrow when I wake up it won’t be so bad. I can only hope.

-- rakaur // 2008.01.29 @ 10:11 PM

Physio

[ rakaur on Wed Jan 16 at 05:55 PM // category: health, life, pain ]

First day of physical therapy. She was very nice. She asked me a bunch of questions, but didn’t really have any answers as far as the pain went. She performed an exam and told me I was “the perfect patient for physical therapy” and she believed that physio would help me a lot.

We did a few exercises and electrotherapy which felt pretty good. The pain is unchanged right now. Obviously it’s only the first day.

Here’s hoping.

-- rakaur // 2008.01.16 @ 05:55 PM

Disturbing Sleep Disturbances

[ rakaur on Wed Jan 16 at 12:02 PM // category: health, life, pain ]

Just adding on to my last post, I’ve also noticed a change in my sleep patterns. When I’m on a not-so-bad-pain day, and I can actually get to sleep without drugs, I tend to sleep for long periods of time, often as much as 18 hours. I’m a night person, and when not in school normally go to bed around 2am, and get up at 11 or so. Lately, I’ve been going to bed at 12:30am and waking up at 1-2pm. One night I came home from a short shift at 6pm, and fell asleep for no apparent reason. My girlfriend woke me up around 11:30pm because she was worried I wouldn’t be able to sleep later. We went back to bed around 1:30am and I didn’t get up until 1:30pm-ish. Before this, I often had trouble sleeping, and now I seem tired most of the day. Caffeine doesn’t seem to help much. I first thought it was the cyclobenzaprine, but sometimes it happens when I’m not taking it, and it didn’t happen for the two months prior while I was taking it.

Lately, since school has started, I’ve been going to bed at midnight or so and waking up around 8. That’s a normal eight hours, but I feel totally exhausted in the morning and I’m very reluctant to get out of bed. I’ve already slept through the alarm once, which I never used to do.

It also appears as if I can no longer take ibuprofen. When I have (relatively) minor pain I just take ibuprofen, but it kills my stomach/intestines now, even if I just do 200mg. The same thing happens when I take naproxen. I can’t tell that APAP does anything for the pain. I guess I just have to suffer through it, because I’m not about to take pain pills for headaches and other random pain.

I’m not entirely sure what to make of any of this.

-- rakaur // 2008.01.16 @ 12:02 PM

Okay, Maybe Not

[ rakaur on Tue Jan 15 at 09:35 PM // category: health, life, pain ]

It’s been a while, and there’s been some interesting developments.

I went to the pain management center on the 21st of December. He did an exam, and reviewed my films with me. Basically, they’re all unremarkable, as was the exam. He said he’s not sure why there’s pain. He wrote me a prescription for cyclobenzaprine. Since he had a complete lack of a diagnosis he ordered me to take two months of physical therapy. I start tomorrow.

Since then I’ve gone through 60 5mg pills of cyclobenzaprine. They help hold off the pain some, but they don’t do a whole lot for me. They help me sleep, but they’re mostly useless when the pain is bad.

Also, I’ve had a number of developments. The pain is almost always in my lower back. Starting around Christmas my neck had been hurting me so badly that the back pain was eclipsed. The reason for the neck pain eludes me. When I woke up the pain was mostly gone. Any activity of even the light variety is severely limited. Going up the stairs is painful. Walking longer than a hundred meters is painful. Gabapentin appears to help, but it apparently makes me swell up. The pain comes and goes, and varies in intensity from achey to immobilizing.

I also had an episode of severe shoulder pain, for no apparent reason. One night my shoulder hurt so bad I couldn’t sleep. It took 12 hours for it to go away, and I was miserable the entire time. I have no idea what this was from, if it was related, I don’t know…

I’m at a total loss on what to do next. Maybe therapy will help. I don’t know. I feel hopeless.

-- rakaur // 2008.01.15 @ 09:35 PM

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