Author: Paul Tomblin

The current state of pain

Let’s see where I currently stand.

Knee Pain

I’ve had knee pain since I was approximately 14 years old. It’s mostly a diffuse unlocalized pain that is usually moderate but sometimes gets worse. But the worst is this stabbing pain that feels like somebody going jabbing an ice pick under my knee caps. That doesn’t happen too often, thank goodness,

Back then, the usual doctor’s approach was “Take these anti-inflammatories and stay off it for a few months”, which I would do and then restart doing stuff and then it would flare up again. Sometimes they’d tell me to do some stretches and exercises to build up my quads. Never did much except make them hurt more. Over 40+ years I tried everything from physio to having an arthroscope shoved in there to acupuncture, and no physical cause or any form of relief was ever found. But in 40+ years, I’ve also made peace with the limitations it’s placed on me. Gave up running, orienteering, backpacking, canoe tripping, walking too far, and also got more aware of doing things that could hurt them, like sitting with my knees bent.

Unfortunately in the mid to late 80s cross country ski racing was really becoming heavily biased towards skate-skiing, which was just terrible for my knees. I recently restarted skiing with several self-constraints: no skating, no skiing without groomed tracks, no racing, no more than 3 or 4 times a week. (I did 3 days in a row once and got stabbing pains in my knees afterwards.)

Ischial Tuberoscopy Area

This pain (aka “Butt pain”) came on about 2.5 years ago, and steadily got worse all through the 2021 kayak season. By April or May I was stopping in the middle of training paddles to stretch and rest my butt. By June, I was stopping frequently in the middle of races to lift my butt out of the seat. By the last race of the season, I got out of the boat and realized I would never paddle again that season. A month later I was on a long car ride (not driving) and it was so painful I was holding back the tears by the end of it. The pain was a major reason for retiring from work at the end of 2021.

This pain feels like it’s right on the “sit bones”. One of the many doctors or physical therapists I’ve seen in the last year and a bit explained just how complicated that area of your body is – as well as the sit bone (aka ischial tuberoscopy), there are bursae there, your sciatic nerve comes through and several muscles including the performis and quadrilateral femorus attach to your hip right there. It’s a very small area, near the surface and the pain level is directly related to how many hours and how hard it’s being pressed. Unfortunately because of all the things I’ve had to give up because of my knees, this pain has forced me to give up just about everything I planned to do in my retirement, like kayaking, cycling, traveling, visiting family, sitting at a computer, etc.

I’ve spent so much time in the last year seeing doctors and physical therapists and trying all kinds of diagnostic and therapeutic measures. Pretty much the last kick at the can was a spinal cord stimulator trial, but that failed. Nobody will give me any pain meds other than OTC Aleve and Tylenol, which do almost nothing (not nothing, just almost nothing). I’m kind of despairing right now.

Other Hip Pain

I haven’t actually been feeling for a while but I sometimes get an intense stabbing pain in one hip joint or the other. I started walking the dogs twice a day instead of once because walks seemed to help.

Tooth/Jaw Pain

Back in October or November, I had two fillings put in by a new (to me) dentist. He warned me that I had a filling there that was almost too large and I’d probably need a crown there sooner or later. One of those new fillings was painful right from the start – I hoping it would just sort itself out and it kind of did. The pain diminished but then recently got worse. The first thing they did was to correct my bite by reshaping the top of the filling, and that helped for a week or two, but then it got really, really painful on a Friday afternoon. So I suffered through a weekend and when I got back to the dentist he scheduled and then did a root canal (on the same day my stimulator trial was declared a failure, so it was a really great day, let me tell you.) It’s been getting better every day as the antibiotics take hold. But I’m also now painfully aware that I grind my teeth at night and clench them during the day if I’m not thinking about them. The dentist said they’re checking with the insurance company as to whether I’m eligible for a night guard.

Headaches

I get headaches nearly every day, and they often last all day. Sometimes I think they’re eye strain, but sometimes they wake me up in the middle of the night and then they’ll wreck my sleep and be with me half the day. I think at least the middle of the night ones are probably related to the teeth grinding. The day time ones might be as well or they might be eye strain. I’m thinking I might have to see my optometrist again to check my prescription.

Ear ache

I’m not sure why “headache” is one word but “ear ache” is two, but that’s the way it looks right to me.

I’ve fairly recently had a sort of hotness and ache in my left ear. That’s the same side as my painful tooth (and infection) so it might be related. It’s only a small inconvenience so I wouldn’t mention it except for the possible connection to the tooth.

Gross as this might sound, I produce a lot of ear wax. I had to buy a second set of AirPods because the first set got clogged with wax and I kind of broke something trying to clean the screens. Back when I worked at the Ministry of Transportation and Communications (the only place I ever worked that was so big and old-fashioned that they had a company nurse and doctor) the company doctor syringed out my ears once (after I got a complete blockage) and after 3 days of fruitless syringing suddenly this chunk of wax about the size of two joints of my pinky splashed down in one of those weird banana shaped basins doctors like. These days I use a paper clip that I’ve twisted to put a loop in the end to scoop out wax. I’m sure a doctor would scream if I showed them what I’m going but I’ve been doing it for years.

Restless Leg Syndrome?

If you’d asked me five years ago about Restless Leg Syndrome, I’d say it was a made up thing to sell drugs. But sometime over the last few years I’ve found myself with my legs twitching without any reason. If I feel it coming and concentrate on it really hard, I can stop it, but only for as long as I concentrate. As soon as I go back to reading or whatever, it starts up. Slightly annoying.

To sum up

I don’t where I’m going forward from here. My therapist thinks the knee and butt pain are related to past trauma, which is why they’re not responding to treatments. But I’m not seeing any pain relief in therapy either. I keep asking him when I can expect any sort of change, and he just says it’ll happen when it happens.

But while I wait, I keep hoping for physical medicine to prevail. But I don’t see what I can do on that front. I’m also going to start pursuing “alternative medicine” for pain relief.

Finally got it!

So I already wrote about my first attempt to do “Active Track” with my drone at Bristol Mountain Nearly lost my drone today. My second attempt got abandoned because after I launched the drone and was trying to set up the video when a gust of wind took it and drove it into the bushes. The third time I think I forgot to start the video recording. The fourth time, I bought a screen shade / screen protector so I could see the screen better, but I forgot about the big video start/stop button on the top of the controller, so it stopped recording as soon as I tucked it into my jacket, and started recording again when I took it out at the end.

But this time, it all came together. I decided not to tuck the controller into my jacket, and just let it pendulum around in front of me. That was mostly a factor on the big climb at the turn-around on the Hale-Bopp train. But I checked that it was still recording a couple of times, and it seemed to be recording fine.

Bristol Drone Video

Ok, there’s one weird thing – at one point it gets very close to a small branch, I can’t tell if it touched it or not, but the video got strange and wobbly. About 3 minutes later, it gets close to another branch. This time, it really doesn’t look like it touches, but the wobbliness clears up. I wonder if the gimbal is a bit frozen and it’s just bouncing around. I’ll have to look to see if there’s anything on the logs.

Oh, and a second weird thing – on the second loop around, the drone hits that very same branch and crashes. Maybe it was harder to see because the snow got knocked off the first time, but I don’t know. When I tried to relaunch it, it first wouldn’t climb, and then when I tried to land it, it suddenly took off upwards and hit a branch way above me and crashed again. I figured there must be some snow in one of the motors or something so I put it away..

Nearly lost my drone today

So I went skiing at Bristol today. I brought my drone alone just in case it wasn’t too crowded. However I made several mistakes:

  • I didn’t bring my reading glasses, which makes it hard to see what’s on the controller screen
  • I didn’t preload a map of the place on the controller
  • I didn’t recharge the batteries even though it’s been long enough that (I now know) the batteries purposely discharge to 60% or so
  • I didn’t realize that the wind was very strong above the treetops, and do something about the battery low or loss of signal RTH (Return to Home) function to do something other than rise up to 300 feet and get blown away
  • I didn’t set the home point somewhere where there were no trees overhead

So anyway, it was doing a fantastic job following me. I kept glancing back because the Mini 3 Pro is so quiet you can’t hear it unless there’s no other sound around. Even people who skied past me didn’t seem to realize there was a drone behind me. (Obviously I had it flying high enough that it wouldn’t hit anybody) But with about 300 meters left on the course I suddenly realized it wasn’t following me. I couldn’t read the messages on the screen, but I suspected it had done an RTH.

I quickly continued on to the home point, and it wasn’t there. I was looking up and I couldn’t see it or hear it, although if it was still up at 300 feet I probably couldn’t do either. Eventually I realized that the video was just pure white and it had a message about the motor stopping, so I realized it was probably crashed in the snow, but it might have been in a tree top.

I took off my skis and hiked a direct line through the woods between the home point and where I’d last seen it, scanning the snow and tree tops all the way. Then I hiked back to the home point along the trail, still examining the tree tops and snow to either side of the trail.

Around this time I remembered that the controller had a “Find My Drone” function, which I quickly activated while the controller continued to tell me how close the drone’s battery was to dying. Unfortunately, I hadn’t looked at the manual for this, and I wasn’t sure what I was seeing on the map. Again, I forgot to preload the map so all I had was a triangle and a dot with a line between them. I started to ski backwards around the trail, and the line seemed to be getting shorter, so I thought the dot was me. Eventually, however, I realized there was a third dot, and the reason the line was getting shorter was the third dot represented me (or rather the controller) and the map was zooming out to show that third dot as it moved further away from the other two dots.

Applying my masterful powers of deduction, realized the triangle and dot with a line between them probably represented the drone and the home point. I quickly returned to the home point, and that told me that the dot was the home point. Using my amazing orienteering skills, I headed in the direction of the triangle, and found my drone sitting in the snow beside one of the downhill trails. Phew. Can’t wait to see if the video looks any good. I’d love to do this at Cummings Nature Center if they ever get any snow.

Update: It turns out that because I didn’t have my reading glasses and couldn’t see the screen, I didn’t actually record any video during the important part. I got some video of my trying to get my drone set up to follow me, some still pics, and then nothing until a weird little bit of video evidently recorded during the RTH where I have about a second of a view over the valley taken from very high up, and then everything gets very over exposed and you can’t make out anything.

Another drone day

It’s way too warm to ski, I’m way too sore to bike, so I went out and droned. One of the things I was curious about was range – I see people complaining that although DJI says you can fly the drone up to 10 kilometers away from the controller (but only 2 kilometers from the controller in the EU) but they only get a kilometer. I wanted to see how far away I could fly the drone and still see it, or how far away before I got a loss of signal and an automatic return to home.

So I searched for a place with a very good long line of sight. I settled on the Great Embankment Park (GEP) on the canal. I was thinking of Durand-Eastman Park, but the wind was blowing out towards the water, and I didn’t want to get into a situation where my drone was heading out towards Canada without a signal.

GEP is a good place to play with a drone because it’s got several sports fields, and then that long stretch of canal. And being Monday, not too many cyclists and walkers on the path, and being February and the canal is still mostly empty and frozen, nobody to worry about there either. Not the most interesting video, but good for practice.

I discovered many things during today’s flight.

First was that it didn’t matter if it was below the horizon (in the canal cut), above the horizon but below the tree line, or above the tree line either up-sun or down-sun, I would lose sight of the thing well before 400 meters. (I did some blind flying where I couldn’t technically see the drone, although I knew exactly where it was and could see through its camera on my controller – that’s technically illegal, but no harm no foul.)

Second was that I completely misunderstood how to activate “Spotlight” mode. There are three special modes that appear at the bottom of the screen after you draw a square on the screen of the controller with your finger. Those are “Active Track”, “Spotlight” and “POI”. I wrote about Active Track in my last blog post, and POI isn’t all that interesting to me because it just circles around the thing you’ve drawn around. Spotlight keeps the camera pointing at the selected point no matter how you fly around it, even if the selected object is moving. But the thing is that when you select the box, and the menu pops up, if you want Active Track or POI you have to select them, and I thought that’s what you’re supposed to do with Spotlight, but when I did that the menu would just go away. It turns out that Spotlight is selected by default and I wasn’t supposed to select it. Oh well, hopefully I’ll remember that for next time.

Third was that a very useful drone move is diagonal flight, where you point the drone and thus its camera off at say a 45 degree angle to the left, and then try to balance the forward and right movement of the right joystick to create straight line motion. I practiced it a lot today but I’m going to need more work on it.

Droning

Went for a bit of a fun practice with my drone (have I mentioned I have a drone? Probably not, I’m a bit sporadic with the blog these days – it’s a DJI Mini 3 Pro, lovely little drone) since it’s been a few weeks, and I was wandering all over this park, trying out the active track on a steep and closed in trail (where it did excellently, by the way). I was walking along and i got the RTH (Return To Home) warning. I was miles away from the Home Point, so I cancelled that, but now I didn’t have a Land icon on the screen – or at least I can’t see it, but it’s on the screen recording so I don’t know . I was on a paved path, so it would have been a perfect place to land if I’d had the opportunity. I decided to do a hand catch. I’ve done a bunch of them before, but like I said it’s been a few weeks since I last flew. Somehow I got my thumb sticking up too much and I got two nice little slices in it, and now I’ve got blood stains all over my drone.

Later on I was flying in this grove of trees, weaving in and out and I lightly tapped a tree and crashed. I examined the drone, and nothing seemed wrong with it, but every time I tried to start it, the props would run for a second and shut down, and give me a warning about a motor being jammed. One of the motors was definitely harder to turn so I gave it a good shaking out and blew it out. It started up and took off, but it was really slow to move. I landed it and took off again, and it was fine.