Category: Pain

What a weekend!

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.

N8439ZSunday, 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.

Vectors for ILS 4 Intercepting the localizer

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

Dornier

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.

Swan Heron Heron
Ducks Ducks Green Heron

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.

Bleargh

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.

Last night’s discoveries

  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.

Good news, bad news, “meh” news.

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.

Getting mentally prepared

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.