So to follow on from The current state of pain, here’s where I stand now. I’ve been paddling for about an hour every 2nd or 3rd day. I’m not very fast, and the thermarest pad I’m using to protect my hip/butt makes me very unstable. I tried biking a few times and after the first one I felt great but after the second my butt was killing me for several days afterwards, so I probably won’t be doing that again. Too bad, because Towpath Bike finally got my gear indexing set up perfectly – it’s smoother shifting that when it was brand new.
Knees
Not much change here. I think I’m getting the “stabbing pain” more frequently, especially after paddling.
Ischial Tuberoscopy Area (aka “Butt pain”)
It got good enough that I was actually able to stand a trip up to Canada, by sitting in the passenger seat with the “sciatica pain” cushion and the seat reclined a lot to keep the weight off my butt. Unfortunately I tried cycling twice and now it feels pretty much the worst it’s ever been. Hopefully it will abate over the next few weeks again.
It’s very hard to remain upbeat about this pain. It’s still restricting my activities and enjoyment of life, and OTC Aleve and Tylenol aren’t really doing much. If I forget to take it for a couple of days, I notice the pain has gone from merely nearly unbearable to completely unbearable.
I really like my new primary care physician, but she seems to have seized upon the last conclusion from the doctor who did the pain stimulator implant test who suggested I should try the Mayo Clinic or the Cleveland Clinic. That seems like a real expensive roll of the dice. I’d have to spend some unknown amount of time away from home, and I don’t know how much or how little insurance would cover.
Tooth/Jaw Pain and Headaches
The tooth/jaw pain I reported last time has been pretty much cleared up. The dentist decided the antibiotic he was giving me wasn’t working, so he switched to something stronger. Almost immediately I got a big swelling on my jaw below a tooth two down from the one he’d started the root canal on. I got that tooth removed a day or two later. After the infection died down and I got the stitches out, the root canal was finished and in a few months they’ll implant a socket where the tooth was removed so I can get a replacement.
Meanwhile, in a quest to see why I’m having all these headaches, I got an MRI of my head which showed a very bright thing in one of my sinuses. It looked scary, but when I eventually got an appointment with an ENT he said it was just a mucosal accumulation cyst, and it was nothing to worry about. About 30-40% of people have one of these and most never know it.
But long before I got to see the ENT, the headaches went away on their own. It seemed to coincide with the progress of the antibiotics. They tell me it’s very rare for infection in the lower jaw to cause headaches, but it sure seems like it did.
Diabetes?
While I was dealing with all these other things, I got a blood test that showed that my A1C had gone from 5.7 last year to 10.7 this year. I’d had this year’s blood test done at a local blood lab that I’d only just discovered was near me and I was finding it hard to believe my A1C had gone so completely to hell in just a year, so I asked for a second test which I had done at the same lab I used last year. This time it was 11.1. That’s full blown diabetes. My doctor put me on insulin – at first slow acting stuff before bed, and later I was also put on fast acting stuff before each meal. What a pain.
When I got my gall bladder out they warned me that it might take a while for my digestion to accommodate the lack of a gall bladder. I wonder if that’s what caused the diabetes? I hope so, because it means it might go away again.
Also, I started noticing that I was rubbing my feet against each other, and it seemed like I was doing it because my feet were always freezing cold and the skin on my feet are always tingling. My doctor did some simple tests and says it’s not due to lack of circulation or lack of nerve sensitivity so it’s probably not due to the diabetes. But it’s still annoying.