Category: Pain

For two or three weeks I’ve been trying a different pain medication, a NSAID called “relafen”. I’m not sure if I’m imagining it, but it seemed to me that last weekend when I went flying I was more susceptable to motion sickness than I have been in the past. And yesterday while I was concentrating on something on my screen (ok, it was the live updates from the Giro D’Italia, not work), I suddenly felt like I was going to lose my balance and fall over, which is kind of odd to happen while you’re sitting still. I also seemed to have to remind myself to breathe when I was concentrating – but hey, it was a exciting mountain stage, what can I say? The “hey, I’m losing my balance” feeling just happened again today, even though the Giro stage I was watching work I was doing was pretty unexciting.

One web site listed vertigo as a very rare side effect of relafen. But why now after 3 weeks, and not back when I started?

Oh well, I’m seeing my doctor tomorrow. Maybe he’s got a different medication to try.

Once again into the breach, once again risking the severe depression that follows every previous attempt to do something about my pain. So it goes. The pain has gotten so severe that I really have no other choice. Just hope I can survive the let down when it doesn’t work.

So I have a new prescription for a new NSAID, and orders for x-rays of my knees and elbows, and a bunch of blood tests. And a promise that if nothing turns out, I’ll get a referral to a pain clinic.

The pain in my knees is really getting out of hand. It’s been getting worse for decades, but for the last couple of weeks I’ve been getting a stabbing pain on top of the usual diffuse pain – I used to get that every few months and it would only last for a day or two. My tolerance for any sort of activity has gone way down, and Alieve isn’t doing as much as it used to.

I was planning to clean out the basement and my office this weekend, and hopefully get out kayaking for the first time of the season. Instead, all I managed to do was replace the locks on the garage and clear out the cardboard boxes that have been waiting to be flattened to go out to recycling for months. Oh, and walk around the block once looking at the garage sale. And for that, I’m paying in agony.

I guess if I recover enough, I’ll have to do the cleaning out in short chunks of time every evening instead of one big weekend project. And hopefully fit in the kayaking one of these days.

(And yes, I am going to talk to my doctor. Not that I have an iota of hope that he can do anything.)

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.

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.