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Normal?
I didn’t post yesterday (you must be relieved to not hear from me) because I had too good of a work day. :-) Code I had been working on for almost two months finally came together and showed the proper result on the screen. A long time ago I worked on the audio stack in Windows and I could explain to people what I did at work, “I make sound come out of Windows computers.” Then for a long time I couldn’t explain what I did to non-techies and now I can, sort of, explain what I do again. I help make stuff appear on the screen of Windows computers. So stuff appeared on the screen and I was happy.
Well, stuff appeared on the screen only after I made it to almost 5:00 and then I felt an extreme wave of exhaustion wash over me and I Had To Lay Down. After an hour, I woke back up again as groggy as can be. I’m a good napper, I can wake up instantly from just a short nap and feel instantly revitalized. But not right now, laying down is a major investment in loss of consciousness. After I finally got back to my laptop, I fixed what we engineers call an “off-by-one” error and everything magically started to work. OK, it’s not really magic, but it feels like magic when many weeks of effort flows seamlessly from beginning to end and the desired result pops out the other side. Software has so many ways to malfunction as I am sure all of you are aware. :-)
In the last two days I became, miraculously, mostly pain free. Today, I want to talk about pain again in a retrospective and propsective sense.
Retrospectively, I want to talk about the “pain scale” again. My friend John sent me this link: https://www.prohealth.com/library/what-the-pain-scale-really-means-34982 . I wish I had ben able to read this in the hospital instead of them just asking me a number on some arbitrary scale that I couldn’t really relate to.
In the upper end of “Moderate Pain” and the lower end of “Severe Pain” there are some interesting descriptions. 6 - “Moderately strong pain that interferes with normal daily activities. Difficulty concentrating”. I have had at least that level probably many hundreds of times. 7 - “Severe pain that dominates your senses and significantly limits your ability to perform normal daily activities… Interferes with sleep.”
Let’s stop here a second. They don’t get to “crying out and/or moaning uncontrollably” until level 9. This happened to me repeatedly in the first week. I think you can have level 7 pain that is audibly transmitted to others. It actually hurts those other people, I can assure you. I guess they call that empathy. Many people in the hosptial said I had a high pain tolerance. I don’t know about that, but I’m not so wimpy that a little pain causes “crying out uncontrollably”. It takes a lot.
I think the key thing that helped me here is my pain has been episodic. I have episodic bouts of level (put in your favorite number) pain. These episodes Hurt Like Hell. But just for a brief moment. And then they subside, sometimes quickly, sometimes not so quickly. But if any of these pain episodes lasted minutes or longer, I would be on opiates. I’m pretty sure of this. When I have told various people “My pain is tolerable”, I think this is because the episodes have been brief, albeit very intense sometimes. Even the day after the accident, laying in bed (prior to the miracle Toradol) had periods of zero pain. It’s pretty easy to deal with episodes of pain when the steady state is little to no pain.
Prospectively, it’s been 10 days since The Fall and today I feel the most normal and pain-free since the accident. Coughing still hurts (a lot). My lower back aches a lot. I still have to be extremely careful about keeping centered and not bending or twisting. I’m still getting stabs of pretty bad pain, but they are very infrequent now. I’m seeing my primary care physician tomorrow and I’m going to ask him his opinion on whether I should be ramping down on the NSAID’s.
Another thing that came back over the last couple of days is a strong sense of balance while walking and standing. I can bend my leg across the other knee (forming a “4”) and put a sock on. This entails balancing on one leg, which is not something I could have contemplated doing just a few days ago. I have my brace on but the walker hasn’t been used the last couple of days. I’ve been in the house and I will use the walker if I go outside because I’m not testing my balance on all manner of pavement and depending on my fragile state of being to keep me from a simple fall. Which I’m sure will cause, at a minimum, a lot of pain, and potentially re-injury of something I don’t want to re-injure.
The recovery is uneven, though. Last night I could not, for the life of me, rest on my right side. My back would seize up in a werid, contorted way and I couldn’t remain in that position. Not very painful, but supremely uncomfortable nonetheless. I could do this even when I was in the hospital, but not last night. And I’m still very immobile in bed. Sitting up in bed without a lot of assistance is completely out of the question still. But I wasn’t wound up like a guitar string with back spasms, either, thankfully.
I feel, most of all, very very lucky and grateful. I still think the key to progress here is to keep centered and allow the healing to progress slowly. There isn’t a lot of benefit to rushing things and having a setback. This really is a “slow and steady” kind of endeavor.