Category: Pain

I should be doing something

It’s a beautiful day. I should be out riding my bike, or kayaking, or clearing out the basement, or putting up screen windows, or getting IFR current again, or something. But I’m not, because my knees hurt worse than they’ve hurt in months, possibly years, and it’s a chore to walk down the stairs to get something to eat, never mind do something that involves using them for anything. And it’s that stabby pain that I get every now and then, as opposed to that diffuse pain that’s part of the constant background, and that pain does not seem to respond to Alieve at all. The diffuse pain doesn’t respond quickly or well to Alieve, but at least if I forget to take it for a couple of days I notice the pain level increasing. This stabby pain comes and goes on its own schedule.

Maybe I’ll use the time to fix the OpenID commenting on this blog (or at least get it back to the point where it works for some people, like when I use it myself from my Powerbook, but not for other people, like when I use it myself from my Linux computer at work). Or fix the long broken loader scripts on my waypoint generator site. Or see if I can get the Gallery upgrade to work this time. But I don’t feel like it – I’d rather just curl up and try to sleep. At least then I wouldn’t be aware of the pain.

Why I hate dentists

They say “you’re going to feel a slight pinch” when they really mean it’s going to feel like they’re driving an ice pick through the roof of your mouth into your eye socket.

They tell you to sit up so they can take an x-ray while you’ve got a 2 foot long pipe cleaner sticking out of hole in your front tooth. Then they tell you to hold the film in place with your finger.

They keep screwing these things that look about 2 feet long into your mouth, and then pulling it out. I kept closing my eyes when they brought it out because I was sure it was going to be covered in blood.

All during the root canal, you can hear her stomach growling, and afterwards she tells you not to eat for an hour. Yeah, I bet you’re not going to wait an hour.

And after it all, they tell you you’re going to have to come back in a week for more pain.

Ow ow ow ow

I had peridontal surgery this morning. Evidently my bad habit of sticking sharp things into the gap between my upper front teeth has caused the bone to erode to dangerous levels. They cut away the gum down to the bone, scraped away accumulated crud on the bone, applied something to make the bone grow again, and stitched it back up. It wasn’t all that bad while it was going on, except the novocaine made my nose numb. But now it’s done and the novocaine has mostly worn off. And I’ve got the pain you’d expect from having your gums cut open and the bone scraped, plus the stitches are irritating the inside of my lip. The pain killer they gave me is making me feel bleary and very sensitive to movement, and doesn’t seem to be doing anything about my mouth. And I can’t eat anything that involves “incising” with the front teeth for two weeks.

This is less fun than I thought it would be.

More of the same.

Still muddling along on the project mentioned in Rants and Revelations » Stress, stress, and more stress. My boss wants my bit to be test-able and demo-able by the first of the month, and I’m not sure I can do it. I don’t think the other bits are going any better. The Chinese team have delivered something, but we can’t test it yet until my bit and Tony’s bit are finished. Kris is working on a bit that we were going to farm out to the Chinese team, but we decided it would be faster for him to do it than to try to explain it to them. It seems that in order specify the requirement in sufficent detail that you could just hand it over to a foreign team, you need a formal language. And the formal language we know best and can produce fastest is Java.

In added aggravation, just as I was turning into the parking lot at work this morning, my muffler started dragging on the ground. A quick examination seemed to indicate it was just the strap hangar broke, which is exactly what it turned out to be. Cheap, but time-consuming and annoying.

Meanwhile, the peridontist is going to be fixing my front teeth this Saturday. He says they have to make an incision in the front of my jaw, scrape out crud, and put in something to make the bone grow back. He says I won’t be able to “incise” for a couple of weeks.

Saturday is also the day when we have our MoveOn.org Call For Change party. I have a bit of a mental block against making phone calls to strangers thanks to an incident from my childhood, but maybe I can just play host.

On Monday, my 1U server goes off to the colo. I just got the network settings, so sometime on Sunday I have to take down the server and set up the networking.