Rants and Revelations

Saturday, I woke up to an email saying that my waypoint generator had a bunch of Canadian airports with US-style identifiers (instead of CYRP, Carp was KYRP). I fixed that first. Then Vicki and I replaced the outside front floodlight which had a wonky socket. And we replaced the floodlights over the garage, which supposedly had a light sensor (although it was more of a randomness generator) with one that had a motion detector. Since we can’t find a switch for these lights, I like the idea that they won’t be on all night. This involved hacksawing off a bit of iron pipe conduit that was sticking out too far to put the box where I wanted it and some simple wiring. Or at least it would probably be simple wiring for somebody who isn’t scared of ladders and electricity (gee, my brother used to shock me with electricity and throw me off barn beams - see a connection?). But we got it done - I’m so domestic it hurts.

Sunday, I got up bright and early to be a safety pilot for Paul P. He’s been my safety pilot in the past, so it was only fair, even if it did mean getting up ungodly early. I took some pictures while he was buzzing around, but most of them sucked. Here are a few that didn’t suck too bad.

Back at the airport, there was an ancient Dornier flying boat re-engined with modern turboprop engines. Cool!

After that, I went kayaking again. This time I went a little slower, and went up all the way to Blossom Road. The river was still quite shallow, and fast. I lost track of the number of times I had to put down my paddle and push down and forward or backward on the bottom of the river because I was bottomed out. (Try that with a canoe!)

On the way back I took one of the other branches because this canoe full of girls can careering across the river and rammed me without making the slightest effort to slow down or avoid me - after they saw they were on a collision course, they all stopped paddling - and when I got to the fork there was another one of these canoes full of girls sideways in the river. But it worked out well - there was a Great Blue Heron on the bank of the river that I got a couple of shots of, and then some “ducks in a row”, and then a Green Heron, which I ‘ve seen very few of over the years.

The best pictures from today’s paddling.

Unfortunately on the way home I noticed that I had a really badly sprained wrist. Unfortunately it’s my left one (I’m left handed), but I suppose the right would have been worse since it would be hard to shift my car like that. It was literally a big pain trying to put my kayak away afterwards.

This morning, because of the pain in my elbows caused from overzealous paddling yesterday, I took some asseto^Waceto^Wecset^Wtylenol with codiene. At first I just felt this weird feeling of disassociation from my body - except the pain in my elbows, that penetrated like a million candlepower spot light through fog. But 5 minutes ago I broke out in a sweat and now I feel like I’m going to throw up. It’s going to be a fun day at work.

Update: Around 10:30 I had to literally RUN to the bathroom because I was about to throw up. I got there, but I didn’t throw up. I stood over the toilet for 15 minutes until the urge passed. It’s now 2pm, and I finally feel like I can actually think and work again, but of course my elbows are quite painful - although no worse than they were a few days ago. I used to have a large jar of ibuprophen in my desk drawer, but I took it out for some reason. I think I need to bring it back.

1. Back massages are wonderful, both for relieving back muscle strain caused by moving heavy computer equipment around and for giving you time totally disassociated from everything to think.
2. Doing editing of massive MySQL dump files to turn them into files that Postgres can read, and loading them into Postgres to test, on a linode with 64Mb of memory and a shared processor does not make sense when you have a local machine with Postgres on it, 1024Mb of memory and two processors.
3. The perl script that I downloaded from SourceForge to convert MySQL dump files into Postgres dump files SUCKS ROCKS and I’m getting much better results from my own little sed script.

That is all.

First things first: The house is beautiful on the outside, and from the inside the breakfast nook and glassed in porch are still everything I’ve ever wanted in a house. However, the inside reveals a tiny master bathroom, a tiny basement, a tiny garage, possibly bad plaster, and a bunch of things that make you think “I don’t want to spend a quarter of a million dollars on a fixer-upper.” So it looks like our conscience will be clear on passing this one up. Considering all the factors I mentioned yesterday, that’s probably a good thing.

Secondly: Today was my appointment with the rheumatologist, Dr. Tammi L. Shlotzhauer. She’s written a book on rheumatoid arthritis, but I was pretty sure I didn’t have that. Over 30 years of diagnosis attempts, I’ve got a pretty good handle on what I don’t have. Not so great a handle on what I do have, though.

Any way, she listened to my story (or an abbreviated version thereof) and poked and prodded. She said “well, we don’t really have a name for what you have, but ‘degenerative arthritis’ is about as close as we can come.” Basically, as I’ve always suspected, I just have a very strong susceptability to soft tissue injury. Anyway, she suggested that I try glucosamine and chondritin. I’ve tried them before - I gave them a month, based on what some orienteering friends told me - but she says to give it 3 months, and to use a much higher dosage, and to keep using ibuprophen as needed for pain and inflammation. She also told me to do some quad lifts, something I’ve done before, but maybe in conjunction with the glucosamine it will do something. She’s also going to give my doctor a list of long term anti-inflammatories to try if the glucosamine doesn’t work. Well, I wasn’t expecting miracles, and I didn’t get miracles, but I got as good as I could hope for.

Inigo Montoya: Who are you?
Wesley: No one of consequence.
Inigo Montoya: I must know.
Wesley: Get used to disappointment.
—The Princess Bride

Tomorrow I go to see a rheumatologist about my joint pain problems. In the 25+ years that I’ve been dealing with this pain, I’ve started dozens of different treatments, always with high hopes. I keep telling myself not to get my hopes up, but inevitably I do, and when the treatment fails to help, I go into long periods (sometimes months long) of depression.

I’ve been trying, really trying, not to get too excited about this appointment, but a few times I’ve caught myself thinking about what I’ll do when (not if, when) I can resume orienteering or cross country skiing or mountain biking. Damn my mind - why won’t it do what I tell it to do?

I know full well what will happen - they’ll either half listen to the litany of pain starting when I was 14 years old, slot it into one of their convenient categories and say “Oh, that’s just patella femoral syndrome/chondromalacia/compartment syndrome/rheumatoid arthritis/blah” and prescribe a treatment that I’ve tried three times already and which has made it worse every time, or they’ll get all enthusiastic about trying some new stuff, but after a few months of throwing everything at the book at it they’ll say “sorry, we’re stumped”. It’s happened at least a dozen times before, and it crushes me every time. It’s gotten to the point where it takes me months to work up the courage to even try a new doctor or a new treatment because I know how depressing it will be when it inevitably fails.

I’m sure Vicki will now post a comment saying that I’m not going to get anything out of the treatment if I go in with a negative attitude. But I’ve gone into treatment with a positive attitude, and it only makes it more painful when it does fail. And I’m desparately trying to quell the enthusiasm that seems to be welling up inside me in spite of myself.

It was a lot easier when I didn’t have a wife and children - I could tell myself “if it gets too bad, I’ll kill myself”. Well, that’s no longer an option. Even when it was an option, it always seemed that every level of pain was “I can stand this, but no worse” - and then it would get worse, and I’d say “well, I guess I can stand this, but no worse”. So I guess I can endure.

In other “get used to disappointment” news, Vicki and I had started looking at homes. The intention was just to get to know the neighbourhoods and price ranges and the like, so that after she gets her mother’s house sold and we get our house tidied up and maybe do some remedial work on it and it’s ready to sell, we will know where to look. But we made the mistake of looking at this house, and while we haven’t been inside yet, what we’ve seen from tromping around the grounds and peering in the windows, it looks perfect. It’s an old house, but it’s had a couple of additions, a breakfast nook and a glassed in patio, both looking out on a deep ravine, big mature trees, bird feeders and deer footprints. It’s also in what looks like a real neighbourhood - the kind where you know your neighbours and do stuff together.

The “get used to disappointment” part comes from the fact that although it’s been on the market for a year, they suddenly have two contingent offers on it. Trying to beat those two offers with a firm offer and arrange a down payment and mortgage and all that in this time frame, while Vicki’s still tidying up her mom’s estate and our house isn’t anywhere near ready to list and Laura’s heading off to college and Vicki has surgery scheduled in a few weeks and all that stuff - it just doesn’t look possible.

The good news is that I have a rheumatologist appointment. The bad news is that it’s for 30 March 2005.

Yes, really.

My doctor faxed all my stuff over to a rheumatologist, and told me to call her on Monday. I did, and she said she needs time to study the information. I haven’t heard back from her.

Meanwhile, I’m still waiting for my god-damned insurance company to approve a perscription for Celebrex.

…how much I hate the fucking US medical care “system”?
Continue reading ‘Have I mentioned recently…’ »

After Friday’s revelation by the orthopod that the elbow pain is most likely joint related rather than tendon related, my physio changed tactics and did some pulling and pushing on my arms that seemed designed to loosen up the joint. And I think it worked at loosening things up.

For all last evening, and most of the night, my left elbow would get feeling “out of joint”, and then I’d rotate my wrist and you could *hear* it snap back into position, and then it would be relatively painless for some time until the next time it needed to be snapped back, usually within 10 or 15 minutes. It’s still doing it now. It feels weird and just a little disquieting.

I took two of those pain pills before going to bed last night, at about 12:30. I woke up about 9:30, and immediately had to run for the bathroom - I thought I was going to throw up, but I didn’t. I was nauseated and sweaty, so I went back to bed. And woke up at 1:30, still feeling a little nauseated and sweaty.

Googling for “ultracet side effects” shows that about 3% of people in the clinical trials reported nausea. So maybe it’s not the pills, but I don’t think I’m going to risk it.

As I blogged about earlier, last night the pain in my elbows was so bad I could barely sleep last night, even with a massive overdose of Alieve. I called my physiotherapist, but she doesn’t work on Fridays. I called my doctor, but he doesn’t work on Fridays. I had read somewhere that sometimes tennis elbow responds to cortisone injections, and so even though the only cortisone injection I’ve had hurt like hell going in and didn’t do much, I was desperate enough to try it. The doctor’s nurse does work on Fridays, however, and she arranged an appointment for me at a “urgent care” orthopedist.
Continue reading ‘Progress, of a sort’ »

In spite of 3 weeks of physio therapy and behaviour modification (better typing position, taking breaks from typing to stretch), and a month and a half of not kayaking, last night my left elbow was more painful than it has ever been before. I had to ice it and take three Alieve tablets before bed, and I still didn’t sleep very well. Shouldn’t I be seeing improvement, not worsening at this point?

Yesterday my physio gave me a 24 hour iontophoresis patch. Kind of a cool idea - it uses two patches, one with the drug, one with an electrolyte solution, and a metallic strip joining them. The idea seems to be to form an electrical circuit along the muscle and have the ions of the drug migrate through the muscle. I have no idea if it works. This morning that elbow feels worse than the other one, but it normally feels worse.

She also told me to stop doing that stretch that hurts so much.

I’m beginning to wonder if the quick diagnosis of tennis elbow was correct - the pain feels more like it’s in the joint than in the tendon.

I think icing last night helped, at least up until the part where the bag leaked and the ice water spilled all over the sheets.

More taking breaks and stretching. That one stretch still hurts - I think I’m going to cut it out. I’ve got physio again tonight, I’ll see if she can give me a better stretch.

Well, I took the physio’s advice about taking breaks and stretching more often. I can’t say whether it helped or not, but it probably didn’t hurt. I’m currently icing one elbow - I don’t have enough ice to do both.

In spite of her advice on how to modify it, one of the stretches still seems to hurt - not a nice pulling out the tension stretch type hurt, but a “damage the ligaments” type hurt. Bad hurt. I’ve got to figure out how to stretch “A” without hurting “B”.