I swam for about 20 minutes last night. I found I couldn't go anything above super-slow or it would hurt, so I kept it to super-slow and made my way up and down the lane for a short while, figuring I'd better see how the after-effects came on with a short and easy stint before going for a longer bout. It was nowhere near my usual aerobic level, but it felt good to just be moving, you know? Then I got out of the pool and holy cow! Insta-pain all over again. By the time I got home the whole foot, ankle, and lower part of my leg were on fire. I broke out the ice and kept that going throughout the night, but it's still throbbing. This is probably another scenario where being able to use Tylenol or Advil would come in real handy, but since I can't Plan B (aka suffering through) is my only option.

I think I may have set myself back a bit.

It's a mystery to me how this could have set it off so severely - like how I don't get why the shin splints hurt so much while running but didn't bother me at all with other activities that seemed just as hard on the legs. However, the why doesn't matter as much as the fact that it just *is*, so I need to deal with that.

I've been sitting here with a mug of tea and a baggie of ice for about 30 minutes. I'm still not too awake and my ankle still feels a if it's aflame (while throbbing to a nifty disco beat). Ugh. I'm usually at work by now and here I still am, not really sure what to do with myself.

Grrrr! I really hate not feeling 100%.

Tags: health

I did the grocery shopping after work last night. I got home and left most of the unpacking to my family then dived face first into bed. I briefly considered eating some dinner, but decided I just didn't care about food at that moment as much as I cared about sleep. I think I was out by 7pm.

I had some terrific dreams about traveling to China for a client. There are probably some deeper meanings in there I should be examining, but I really enjoyed my dreams (I really enjoy travel) and am instead choosing to dwell on the happy notion of traveling to China for work. How do I get that job, I wonder? That's the kind of job I'd really love. Towards the end of my dream the client mentioned that they'd like us to also visit a location in Belgium and as I surfaced back to consciousness we were leaving the details on making that happen to our travel agents. Why travel to China and Belgium? I have no idea. I haven't exactly been thinking about either of those places lately which kind of adds to the charm of the whole thing.

I'm feeling a bit better today than I have since Valentine's Day. That was the time I felt pretty all right, went to step class, went out at night despite a sore throat, and awoke the next day feeling as awful as ever. I am planning to work out tonight, but have learned my lesson: if I'm not quite up to it, I'll skip it and sleep instead. My husband heard that today is National Pancake Day and proposed going to dinner at a local place that serves breakfast all day and that wouldn't be a bad way to spend the evening, either. Eating pancakes is kind of the opposite of working out as far as physical health is concerned, but it's possibly just about equal in the mental health category.

Thinking of food has had me pondering the pork shoulder I bought last night. It is to be tossed into a Crock Pot with salsa verde for a leisurely cooking, then will be chipped into bite sized pieces for use in enchiladas - or something kind of close to enchiladas. We use flour tortillas since neither my husband nor I can stand the texture of the corn tortillas (yes, we realize this is both Bad and Wrong). Anyway, in a large baking dish we have tortillas rolled up with refried beans, the cooked pork, and a sprinkling of cheese. Once the dish is filled with these little burritos, in goes the salsa from the Crock Pot. That gets baked for a bit and then YUM! ensues. It's been a few months since we've had that and winter is the perfect time for it. I can't wait.

In other news, this online article on skiving caught my attention. As someone who's been working while ill for weeks (with the full support, not to mention encouragement, of my employer) I have some obvious feelings on the subject. I notice that they mention people who are nurses and policemen average the highest number of days off of work. This makes perfect sense to me. Not only do these people work in high stress jobs that take a lot out of a person, they are also exposed more than most people to all of the germs and other bugs that make us sick. There was a 'scandal' a couple of years back in Portland about police using cell phones paid for by the city to call home and other personal places. For myself, I couldn't figure out why this was a big deal. First of all, if the city doesn't have some sort of unlimited calling plan given the hundreds of people on the cell phone plan, the people administering the program are idiots and that's hardly the fault of the policemen using the phones. Second of all, I would presume that's the kind of job where you may think you're going to get off at a certain time or be able to do something you had plans for, but find that's not going to be the case. I don't begrudge a policeman a few phone calls home in the least and can't understand why it was made out to be such a big deal. If they were talking about excessive calls, that would be different, but that wasn't the case at all. Anyway, I'm of the opinion that there are certain jobs where a little extra leeway with days off or personal phone calls are in order. Nurses and doctors both fall into that category as far as I'm concerned. Give 'em a break, people.

OK, that came from nowhere and sort of dimmed the glow I had all morning thanks to my happy dreams. Which I suppose makes this a perfect time to find someone who's late in getting something done and make some threats to something precious to him follow up nicely.

Tags: dreams, food, health

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That title's what I'd call "fair warning", i.e., you might want to skip all that follows which is the product of a drug- and pain-addled mind.


The sciatica pain marches on. As I'm allergic to over-the-counter treatments to help reduce the inflammation, my options for pain management are limited. I have one of those Empi machines which (counter-intuitively) provides stimulation to the nerves to affect relief. It has varying rates of success for me; when it does work it can dial the pain from a 10 down to a 7 or 8. Not ideal, obviously, but at least it's something.

I couldn't sleep Wednesday night for the pain, so last night I took 1/2 of a muscle relaxer my doctor prescribed the last time I went through this (knowing it doesn't do anything but help me relax, it does nothing to treat the actual problem) plus 1/2 of a sleeping pill. Amazingly, it didn't knock me out right away. Rather, a sort of drift effect came on where I could still feel the pain, but it was like something happening over there, at enough of a distance that I could relax into sleep. I woke up a few times in the middle of the night, told myself to ignore the pain, then awoke this morning at my usual time.

The pain was even worse this morning than yesterday. I don't know if this would have happened had I not slept last night (meaning, if I'd taken care all night long not to put myself into the particular positions that really irritates the nerves), but whatever the reason, here it is. I marveled as I got ready for work that I didn't feel that drugged out feeling I usually feel when I take that muscle relaxer.

I knew I couldn't even make the walk from the park-and-ride to the bus, then subsequently from the bus to my desk, so decided I'd have to suffer the pain of paying for gas and parking and drive to work. Then the question became, can I even drive? Turns out I can, though it isn't pretty.

I did some quick and dirty googling this morning for herbal anti-inflammatory relief. There are a few things I can experiment with, so I'll give them a try. I stopped at Whole Foods on my way to work, hobbled to the herbal remedy section, and luckily happened upon someone stocking the shelves as I wandered into the section, marveling at all of the bottles I'd never seen before. She directed me to some dissolvable St. John's Wort pellets ("pellets" makes me think of animals at the zoo and I giggle at the thought that I'm ingesting pellets, but that really is the best word for them) that I took with my morning tea.

Now that I've been awake a few hours, that drugged-out feeling has come upon me that I was surprised I didn't feel earlier. It's a good thing my job involves sitting down because the combination of pain + drugs certainly doesn't make me feel like physical activity would be a good idea. I'm in mourning over the realization that this will mean missing my Saturday morning work out, which I need for stress relief in the worst way. If not for the fact that I'm climbing the sheerest of cliffs at work, desperately trying to gain some ground, I'd be home in bed alternating between the muscle relaxers, the St. John's Wort, the Empi, and sleep. But all this HAS to be done, so here I am.

Well.

Now that I've had another cup of tea and taken my mind off work for a few minutes, I feel a little more clear in my head and *almost* ready to tackle a piece of this project I'm really not looking forward to doing. We used to have another person to do this as well as a few other things I'm doing for the first time this year; to say I miss having her do them would be an understatement.

Tags: health, medicine, work

It’s a cacophony of sound around here today.

I feel like I’m on an island within an ocean of sick people. My daughter looked absolutely miserable this morning and is missing school. One of my colleagues is in the hospital with lung problems from bronchitis (she’s a chronic smoker, so what would be bad for most people is life threatening for her), another of my colleagues has walking pneumonia, and the person who sits next to me sounds like a lung will be making an appearance outside her body any minute.

Stay away, sick people, stay away. If I never cough again, it’ll be soon enough. Having pneumonia a few years back was one of the two most miserable experiences of my life and I’m in no hurry to repeat it.

******

I went to the dentist yesterday morning and learned, in further proof that life isn’t fair, that I have a cavity that needs to be filled. You see, I brush my teeth all the time. I am constantly berated and teased about the fact that I regularly carry a toothbrush and paste and use them in restaurants and at work after meals. But I learned a long time I ago that if I didn’t, the cavities would be out of control. Every dentist I’ve ever had has said, “You have exceptionally deep grooves in your teeth. Which is great for eating. But it means you need to brush extra carefully.” When I got braces in high school, the orthodontist suggested that I start carrying the toothbrush with me because it would only be worse than usual with extra things in my mouth to trap stuff in bad places. Thus I started this habit long ago and now it’s kind of like washing my hands: I don’t feel quite right or clean if I don’t brush after eating in the same way that I don’t feel right or clean if I don’t wash my hands when…well, you know. So yeah, it’s quite unfair: I brush and I brush and *still* I get cavities. Meanwhile, like in childhood with my siblings, other people ignore brushing and seem to suffer no ill consequences.

******

I need to work on some meeting notes today from a multi-hour meeting last October. My memories of the day in question aren’t too helpful:
--Our frustration with the hotel over the meeting room and food services for which the group had paid a lot of money. For the amount of money in question, we expected better. Much better.
--Stuffing several souvenir items into the box we had used to send materials for the meeting to the hotel so we could ship the same box back home and thus avoid carrying lots of sundry items in our carry on luggage. Genius!
--Some of the topics we discussed at the meeting had research projects attached which we were to report on again in March; now it’s almost March and guess the status of those projects.
--During most breaks, I’d leave the windowless room and walk outside for some air. It was a wondrously pleasant shock every time I left the room that I could walk for about 30 seconds and there would be the sun and the ocean. More than once I was tempted to take a quick stroll around the hotel grounds because meetings where I can take a quick stroll next to the ocean during a break from a business meeting are very few and far between. During one break I was walking with one of my clients and he came across his family. If I ever get around to writing up my Hawaii 2007 posts like I keep meaning to, I’ll tell you about this family. I’ll just say for now that this family has provided much fodder for psychological study and speculation for one of my colleagues and me.
--At one break, one of the clients told us of a “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” kind of scenario that’s come about thanks to privacy laws and asked how other people might handle it. I think of that story from time to time, trying to tease a “think outside of the box” kind of solution out of it all, but thus far the situation has evaded such a resolution.
--After the meeting, one of my colleagues told me a story about the honeymooners her room looked over that had me in tears I was laughing so hard.
--I called my husband just after my colleague and I broke to go back to our respective rooms to change clothes and get a couple of hours of fun in before dinner.
--That night at dinner we had a fabulous time. I drank some wonderful wine – I believe that night was the Willakenzie Estate Pierre Leon, an Oregon pinot noir – and the waiters kept topping off the glass so I had no conception of how much I was drinking until the end of the meal. I was a little tipsy by the time I got back to my room. At my door, I couldn’t get my key card out of my wallet, then dropped it and scattered stuff everywhere. I found a punch card for a local restaurant that I’d been missing for months and it kind of made up for having to stand in the hallway, drunkenly gathering up the contents of my wallet. I dropped some stuff in my room, changed clothes, then went out for one last wander around on our last night there. I found a postcard at one end of the resort and had to go to the other end to mail it, which was just fine by me.

So, I remember stuff…just not things that’ll help me put together detailed notes that need to be submitted to state examiners. ::Wibble::.

However, there’s nothing for it but to press the memory as forcefully as possible until something leaks out so I’d better get back to it.

Tags: hawaii 2007, health, work

I can't figure out why I've had such a run of feeling crappy lately. There was the 4 day hive attack in January. The 2 day hive attack last week (actually, I still have hives and itching - just not so much that it's worth taking the knock out pills). A migraine on Saturday.

I went to work out Saturday morning and it was great. It felt fantastically good - kind of like I was sweating out all of the bad stuff so that only that post-exercise euphoria remained. My daughter was taking a class on babysitting at the gym that lasted a bit longer than my work out, so I sat with a book and a small snack while I waited for her to finish up. We went to eat some lunch, then did a couple of errands - including the essential run to the bookstore to purchase Demon Night - and by the time we were home the crappy feeling was back. Within a couple of hours I had to give in and take a migraine pill because the pain just kept getting worse and worse.

Yesterday there was that echo-ey sensation from the migraine - dizzy and nauseated and enervated - and as if all the pain would be back in an instant if I turned my head the wrong way or stayed vertical for too long at a time. Today's pretty much the same. Which makes it difficult to concentrate or, say, care about work. My body just keeps chanting napnapnapnapnap while my work ethic and determination to feel better chants back nonononono.

In short, 2008 thus far has me feeling much more like a tremulous little mouse (or should I say, rat?) than a ferocious tiger. Or even a reasonably energetic house cat.

In anticipation of cattier days to come, I'm contemplating this Angry!Cat picture (courtesy of stoney321) and the following "cat haikus" (courtesy of my e-mail Inbox):

( Read more... )

Tags: health