Last appointment (hopefully)

Tomorrow is my last doctor appointment, I do believe, on this long saga of appointments regarding all this pain I started having around July. I am very close to pain free, but I feel extremely weaker because I haven't been doing anything!

It's been an expensive trip. I will be on the billing records of the Orthopedic Center in my town for years to come - at least they do take payments. I'm sure it will take about 4 years to pay them off.

My foot - I don't know. I did finally get my inserts, but don't know how they are going to work because you have to wear them for an hour a day at first and then work up, gradually, to longer, so your spine has time to adjust to being right after being wrong all these years. That sounds like a tough assignment to me, but I'll give it a go.

The other stuff - shoulder pain and what the doctor said was carpal tunnel -- I had to see the neurologist who gave me a test that was the most barbaric and painful test I have ever experienced!

They did a test called a Electromyography:

For an EMG, a needle electrode is inserted through the skin into the muscle. The electrical activity detected by this electrode is displayed on an oscilloscope, and may be heard through a speaker.

After placement of the electrodes, you may be asked to contract the muscle (for example, by bending your arm). The presence, size, and shape of the wave form -- the action potential -- produced on the oscilloscope provide information about the ability of the muscle to respond when the nerves are stimulated.

It.
WAs.
HoRRIble.
It was pushing push pins in your body and then sending electricity into you while you had to clinch your muscles on demand.

I would call that test bordering on barbaric. You would think with all the brilliant minds in the world,* that we would have come to a better way to test for this result. That was extremely painful.

The carpal tunnel test was bad enough. It was like someone just stabbing your funny bone over and over again. You could stand it, but it was no piece of cake. The results of that were that I do have some carpal tunnel going on, but not enough to operate, just enough to cause me to drop things and keep going back to the doctor to have it checked. Apparently, it's not something one should take lightly.

Let me insert a warning here: The new generation of computer kids should learn how to do exercises to avoid that carpal tunnel problem of the future!

The neurologist said, after all that (and he agreed with me that it was barbaric) that I do not have a pinched nerve. I do have bone spurs in my neck. I have no idea what the results of that will be. The Orthopedic Surgeon will tell me about that tomorrow.

I did try doing some digging today, fixing a small walkway, and it didn't go as well as I would have hoped. I've lost more strength than I wish. Oh well. Something to do. Regain my strength and get back out there. And work on ways to avoid to cycle of pain.

*Jackson Browne

You probably wouldn't worry about what people think of you if you could know how seldom they do. ~~ Olin Miller