Life Imitating Art

I’m coping with my back, but not well.  The 50mg Tramadol doesn’t help much.  I have no idea why I keep getting prescribed it since I keep telling everyone that it’s not working very well.

Doing chores is nearly impossible.  A single load of laundry sends me to bed.  I can still touch that spot and feel pain.  It’s sharp and stabbing.  It radiates from that spot and travels through my hips, pelvis, legs, and feet.  Sometimes, when the pain gets really bad, I have problems with my feet tingling.

Last week I got a bone scan.  However, my orthopedist also went on vacation for a week.  No refills on the Tramadol.  Nothing to help with the pain.  No results on the scan.  I’m a little irritated about that.

Next week, I go for nerve testing.  Immediately afterwards I have an appointment with my orthopedist.  I’ll get the results of both the bone scan and the nerve test.

However, I’m going into that appointment with a new strategy.  When I was a teenager, I was taught to keep a migraine journal.  For those that don’t have migraines, it is supposed to help you identify your migraine triggers (sunlight is my big one – hard to remove that from my life though).  Anyway, you log when you went to sleep, when you got up, if you woke up during the night, had bad dreams or weird dreams that might disturb your sleep, what you ate at each meal and if a migraine was experienced the duration and pain level of the migraine.

By the time I was in my mid-twenties, I was using the calendar template in Word to track it… And expand upon it.  I stopped just tracking things like food and sleep and started tracking everything because I couldn’t identify many triggers to match the migraine pain.  Which means for the last year, I have kept track of not just my migraines but the leg pain, the back injuries, the level of pain experienced each day, whether it increased or decreased during the day, what exercises I did that day, chores done, the duration of the pain (all day, several days, a few hours), whether it disturbed my sleep, interfered with my ability to eat (migraine pain does and sometimes, so does the leg and back pain), etc.  I’m printing out my August & September logs and taking them with me.  It also tells if my pain level decreased by using any medications.  Hopefully, we’ll get a little farther in the process to finding relief.

But… In a moment of life imitating art, specifically channelling Nadine Daniels… My doctor told me to put heat on my back for 20 minutes of every 2 hours as much as possible.  I also got a back brace at my last appointment.  The brace pushes down on the waistband of my jeans, so I am constantly pulling them up.  On Saturday, I was outside most of the day, sitting in different chairs.  During which time I was bitten by insects at least a dozen times in the area at the end of my tailbone… This is directly beneath the area where I have to apply heat.  And we all know what heat does to itchy bug bites… Oh yeah, makes them itch a ton more.  Even taking Benedryl and applying cream does not make that itch go away when I’m applying heat to my back.  It is the only place I got bug bites this weekend… If I listen carefully, I’m sure I can hear the Universe laughing.