No good news on the medical front

I had a talk with my shoulder surgeon yesterday. He said my MRI didn’t show any “smoking gun”. There was a little damage where the acromium meets the collar bone. There is also evidence of bone bruising, but I’m not sure how that could have happened or how it could be causing a problem that started 3 months ago. He said that might be the problem, or there might even be referred pain from the neck. He basically said that we need to try a few things to help diagnose the problem, so he injected some cortisone into the AC joint. A few hours later, when the numbing agent wore off, I was treated to some of the worst pain of my life.

I slept on a chair last night because I knew that if I slept on a bed, I’d roll onto that side and make it even worse. It’s still pretty bad this morning, but I’m trying to keep it propped on my chair arm and not move it much. I’m back to using my old Bamboo trackpad instead of a mouse because I use that with my other hand, but it registers things as clicks when I don’t mean to click and doesn’t register when I do want to click, so I don’t like it much.

Anyway, if this cortisone shot is anything like the one I got last summer, I’m hoping to start feeling some relief tomorrow or the next day.

Meanwhile I spent half the night wondering what I’m going to do for fun when I can’t paddle any more.

Phil Gustafson, diode re-arranger

Back around 1991-2 era, I joined an on-line community. Or rather, I started participating in a Usenet newsgroup called alt.folklore.urban, the core membership of which was turning into an on-line community, pretty much before the idea of “on-line community” had been invented. We cognoscenti called the newsgroup “AFU”, and the core of the core were known as “the hats” or “old hats” (or later “Best Mates”). One of the first “old hats” was a guy named Phil Gustafson. He was funny, he was smart, he made wicked puns, and he was part of the memes of the group (one of which was that Phil would “rearrange your diodes” if you didn’t behave). He travelled to all the real life meet-ups (which at the time were almost always on the west coast) and it was frequently his descriptions of these meet-ups that had the rest of us rolling in the aisles and wishing they’d have some out this way.
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