Pain in the Neck

For the first time in my life, I feel like my brain hasn't had full control of what is going on south of my cervical vertebrae. Most of my life has been spent dealing with what is going on in my brain, rather than what is going on in my body. My body has dutifully performed all tasks that were required of it, until seven months ago.

I started experiencing severe pain in between my spine and my shoulder blade (I'll leave the medical terminology to those more knowledgeable than myself). It was an intense muscle pain made worse by stress and long hours typing a federal grant. Usually, when I got up from the computer and stretched or went home for bath, my shoulder felt better.

Sometime around May or June, it stopped feeling better. The pain became a constant companion. I was taking more ibuprofen than I should admit to in a public forum and noticed that the pain was spreading to my neck and, most recently, down my arm and through the upper part of my ribs on the right side. Sometimes it's a little uncomfortable when I breathe or when I move in certain ways. I've left work more several times wishing that I could drive my car with my feet instead of my arm.

Finally, after months of stubborn refusal to go to the doctor, I made an appointment to see a family practitioner (mistake 1) that I had never seen before (mistake 2). On the day of the appointment, I was called and told that mistake 1 couldn't see me, but (mistake 3) another doctor that I had never seen before could fit me into his schedule twenty minutes earlier. I hung up the phone, unplugged the iron, decided to wear a different shirt that didn't need ironing, dislodged Zac from his chair and his beloved Wonder Pets, and raced off to see the doctor. When I got there, I waited in the waiting room with Zac for almost an hour. By the time I was finally see, Zac had played all the games he could with the squares on the carpet. He was bored and I was getting cranky.

The nurse that weighed me and took my blood pressure asked what medications I take. This is usually a tricky question for me because some medications are taken "as needed" and I'm never sure if I should include them or not. Just to be on the safe side, particularly since I got a son out of the last potential drug interaction that a pharmacist never told me about, I'm usually on the more conservative end of the patient spectrum and list everything.

The doctor came in and took one look at my list of medications and started freaking out in my direction. "You take too much! This is too much!!" I just stared back at the man that I had now been waiting close to two hours to see. With his wild gestures and proclamations made without any other knowledge of me, it almost seemed like he was worried that I was going to drop dead on the spot. Fortunately, I didn't, which would have been awkward given that Zac was in the room singing "Wheels on the Bus".

"I am under the care of another physician. I'd be happy to give you his name and number if you wanted to consult with him about my medication," I said because clearly I don't write my own prescriptions or just make up drug names to tell unsuspecting nurses. "No, no," he muttered, "That won't be necessary." Then he asked what I had been using to control the pain and I answered him honestly (mistake 4). I had some hydrocodone, also known as I-Love-You-So-Much-I-Wish-I-Could-Have-Babies-With-You Vicadin, from a recent dental surgery that I had been using to control the pain when it was at its absolute worst. Every other time, I used ibuprofen or Tylenol, heating pads, icy hot menthol, and some fervent prayers that I would regain full use of the right side of my body.

"You have been abusing a drug to mask the pain?" He shouted at me. "You have no idea what could happen to your body with all of these," he sneered and gestured again at the sheet of paper in front of him that listed my medications "in your system". I had had enough with this doctor. First he had tried to shame me because of the medications I was taking to treat an unrelated problem, then he says that I'm abusing medication and possibly an addict. "Well, there is no way that I'm going to prescribe you anything thing with codeine in it. You have full range of motion in your shoulder and neck. Most likely, you aren't even in pain at all, but I'll send you to x-ray and write a referral to an orthopedist if you think that you really need it."

I was crying by this point, in front of Zac, who always gets upset and concerned when he sees me cry. I had put up with the pain for so long thinking that it would go away. Now I was being told that not only would it not go away, but I had a doctor that didn't even believe that I was in pain.

So that is where I am now. The results of my x-ray were normal and I have pain almost every day. Gradually, I've shifted from being controlled by my mind and my depression to being controlled by my body. Even my eyes have rebelled. I've had two bouts of pink eye and my eyes continue to be red and irritated. On Sunday I wore contact lenses for the first time in over six weeks, but I'm back to glasses after a hard day yesterday with contacts. Most days, I want to curl up in a ball until my body decides to stop hurting. I've reached my breaking point and I don't know where to go from here.

Mush

I haven't been writing much on here because my post-Ike brain has turned into a large pile of mush. Immediately hitting publish on the, "When, for the love of God, are we going to get power?" post my Mom called and said that the power was on, but that I shouldn't get excited because it was on once before for a crushing 15 minutes of glory before it faded back into nothing.

The power has stayed on.

Every day I go home and revel in electricity. If it wouldn't be weird and slightly dangerous, I'd roll around in some electrical currents and declare myself part of the post-Industrial Age. I love it. Zac loves being able to watch Thomas the Tank Engine videos on the computer and I love DVRing all of the TV shows that I haven't been able to watch this week.

What I've realized is that there is a huge problem with prioritizing the restoration of residential power. The problem is that people go back to work without working stop lights. On Monday it took me an hour and a half to get to work, then almost two hours to get across town for a class I'm taking at Rice University, then an hour to get home at 8pm. That's over four hours in the car. Driving home from my class, I had a complete meltdown. As Oprah would call it, it was an ugly cry. It involved me sobbing in traffic with my eyes to bleary to count the number of electrical and semi-trucks that I passed on my way back to the house.

I'm not even sure that I want to take this class. The class is the second in a series of five classes to earn a credential for non-profit fundraising. I took the first class last spring when I only had one job and a firm knowledge of where to find a clean set of sheets. Now I have two jobs and a class that meets twice a week for two hours. Add in a heap of boxes from the upcoming move this Saturday and suddenly my stress level went from "noticeable, but tolerable" to "holy shit, my head is going to explode as I ram into the back of the SUV going 5mph on the freeway". I had to cancel my therapy appointment, that's how stressed I was. I couldn't imagine trying to go back out into traffic to meet with my therapist and discuss how stressed I was. Simple coping methods of lavender-scented baths and warm heating pads were not making the grade.

Enter a man that I'll call Dew, simply because the name "Frost Heaving" would be too long of a nickname, although I love a great double entendre. Dew and I met about three or four weeks ago. We've gone out on several dates and I've had a great time. Whenever he hears that I'm feeling stressed, his first question is always, "How can I help?" He's asked that a lot in the past month, particularly during the evacuation and week of indoor camping with no electricity. He came over to my parents' house on Tuesday for a frantic packing session that involved twenty cardboard boxes and a lot of children's toys. All of the boxes are now stacked in my parents' dining room, although with the furniture and boxes that I never unpacked that are in the garage.

As of Saturday, September 27th, I'll officially be living on my own again. Zac and I will be living with my parents part-time until the end of my class, but I'm excited and more than a little overwhelmed at being a lease-holder again. Electricity and cable bills are not something that I've missed having. Independence and the chance to walk around naked are though, so there is a positive side to everything.

If I could just get my brain to start working again, I'd be great. Until then, I have to deal with the feeling that I'm swimming through fog while trying to form a sentence. Fortunately, I have a lot of time on the road stuck in traffic to figure out what I want to say.

Day Seven

Words can't even really describe how surreal it is to have power and Internet at work and complete darkness at home. I went out to dinner last night and came home around 9pm. Zac was in bed asleep and my parents were back in their bedroom. No one seemed to notice me hollering into the moonless night that I didn't have a flashlight and, "Hello??! Can someone help me?" went unnoticed. I eventually found my way back to my parents' room and stole one of their flashlights so I could get ready for bed.

The week of not sleeping well as finally caught up to me. I got out of bed this morning, but had the strange feeling that I would fall asleep while driving unless I got back into bed. Sure enough, that's where I went and it was lovely. I called into work around 10am and finally woke up around noon. I blame four days of sleeping next to Zac and three days of having to try and fall asleep with my neighbor's generator parked directly outside my bedroom window. It's like having a Harley idling next to my night stand, except this Harley runs 24 hours a day and keeps food at proper temperatures for refrigeration and freezing. I'm told that it also runs a tv. Bastards.

When we heard on the battery-operated radio that it was going to take days, even weeks to fix the power, I don't think anyone really believed it. The power goes out, then comes back on. That's the normal way things work in the industrialized world. This voyage into indoor camping has got to come to an end soon. I miss frozen food and a microwave. I really, really miss watching tv after I come home from work. I miss showering without a flashlight.

I guess that's just tough for me and the other 61% of Houston-Galveston area households that don't have power. We are officially in the plural now. It has not been just one week - it's been weeks since we've had power at the house.

Luxury Camping

My Dad figured out how to manually light the pilot light on the gas water heater, so now our house has warm running water, in addition to the flushing toilets and gas stove that we had before. Even without power, the hot shower and the bowl of oatmeal that I ate this morning make me feel like I'm at a really nice camp site. The cooler filled with ice, soda, milk, cheese, and our leftovers from any meal that we make only heightens that feeling. My Mom keeps wondering if we should be spraying bug spray more liberally, given the amount of standing water still in the immediate area. I keep wondering if we should be doing more hiking and maybe making S'mores at night.

I'm back at work this morning. There is power and internet here, although a strange lack of employees. I work in East Houston, but a lot of the employees live south, closer to Galveston. I'm hoping that their houses or cars weren't damaged in the storm. For me, the bad part about having to drive 20 miles each direction is that I'm going to need gas fairly quickly. There are limited gas stations that are open and all of them boast long lines of cranky car owners.

It's all to be expected, though. The local city government tried to keep people away from their homes as long as possible. The "All Clear" message hasn't gone out yet and as of the last time I checked, only 37% of Houston has power. Galveston is still completely underwater, yet there is a primal urge to return and survey where you have staked all your hopes and dreams.

The national (and now even the local) media has come down very, very hard on the people that chose to not evacuate, even after the mandatory evacuation order was issued two days before the storm. I understand why they didn't leave, though. People are wary of the media since it's wrong so much of the time. We evacuated for Hurricane Rita and at the last moment the storm veered east and slammed into Beaumont, TX. Even for this storm, they had predicted a 20 foot surge into Galveston. The highest storm surge was recorded at 13 ft. So imagine you live on the island and your house is on 17 foot stilts. Would you evacuate, knowing that so very often the media is wrong? Yes, there both the mayor and the governor called for an evacuation of all coastal areas, particularly Galveston island. Yes, about 40% of the island's inhabitants either couldn't afford to evacuate, didn't want to live in a shelter, physically couldn't evacuate, or just simply chose not to. But let's not call these people "knuckleheads". I'm talking to you Governor Perry.

More people died on the freeways from dehydration and car accidents during the evacuation for Hurricane Rita in 2005 than died from damage caused by the storm. It's understandable why people would chose not to participate in another evacuation. Unless you've been in a car for 40 hours in 100 degree heat with no air conditioner, sleeping on the side of the road, and forced to sit in a gas line for hours on end, perhaps you can keep your judgements to yourself. I wish the search and rescue teams the best of luck. They have done an outstanding job rescuing more than 2,000 people. I'd also like to congratulate the 60,000 people that didn't need rescuing after choosing not to evacuate.

Hurricane Ike

Nothing like a mandatory evacuation to stop regularly scheduled blogging. My parents, Zac, I, and two cats evacuated on Thursday, September 11th, to San Antonio, TX. What should have been a three-hour drive on I-10 took about seven hours. I learned an interesting lesson during that time: it's not actually using the computer that hurts my shoulder and back, it's sitting hunched over for a couple of hours at a time.

We were lucky to find one of the last hotel rooms in San Antonio. Unfortunately, the hotel didn't allow any animals, regardless of the circumstances. Even begging didn't help. There was a firm "no pet" policy that a harried night manager was not going to bend for a car load of hurricane evacuees with very old cats. The cats stayed in a kennel for four days, which probably had more room than three adults and a toddler had in a hotel room with two full-size beds. It's not that I don't love my family. I do. I just love them more when I we have doors that can be shut between us.

Zac has weathered the evacuation remarkably well. He got to sleep next to his Mom for four nights. I can honestly say that I've haven't cuddled that much, for consecutive nights, in over five years. It wasn't enough to sleep near me, or even have parts of his body on me. No, he wanted to meld our bodies together. He had his arm wrapped around my neck and his feet on the small of my back. At one point, he ended up perpendicular to me and kicked me in the chin repeatedly, waking me up as close to cursing as I could get while sleeping next to my parents and supposedly asleep first born.

Not that I can complain much. The drive back took only about four hours. Our house avoided significant damage. My Dad has been helping the neighbors rebuild their fences and find tarps to cover the patches of their roofs. We lost all of the food in our refrigerator and freezer. The power is still off, although we have running water. The lack of power has been giving me a certain amount of flashbacks to Mongolia, but I'm making it through. I'm supposed to be back at work on Wednesday, provided work has power.

Until then, I'll be huddled around a portable 2" tv player, waiting to hear news about when power might be restored and trying, for the eighth time, to explain the concept of electricity to a three year-old that just wants to watch Dora and doesn't understand why the adults are holding out on him.

Endurance

Somewhere between 6:45pm and 7:00pm last night, I hit the wall. My eyes could barely stay open and I was pretty sure that any stemware that stood between me and a chair would be broken on my way down off the step ladder. Normally, I wouldn't be around large quantities of fragile items, but yesterday was my second day at my second job.

Getting a second job sounded like a good idea. I would just work a couple of extra hours around the holiday to pay for unexpected expenses (like a $450 a/c repair on a car that has already had its a/c system repaired three separate times). I also wanted to pay down debt that has been mounting up lately (see unexpected car repairs and root canals). With those lofty goals, I reapplied at a Pier 1 store close to where my parents live. I worked at a Pier 1 store in New Hampshire. Apparently it is a disastrous combination to mix hormonal women and household decor: no less than five of us got pregnant within four months. I found out that I was pregnant with Zac within weeks of another associate finding out that she was pregnant with twins. It was baby mania accented with the smell of lavender room mist spray.

Fast forward four years and I'm back working at Pier 1. Oddly enough, inflation has had the opposite effect on salaries for sales associates. I'm told that the phrase, "cost of living" doesn't really exist in Texas. It's more for Yankees and their delicate sensibilities than for people living extremely close to large forces of nature, like category 3 hurricanes. You just have to suck it up and put your plywood purchases on a credit card down here.

Anyways, I've worked a lot of long hours at my primary job this past year. One of the reasons that I got a second job was because I knew that it would force me to balance out my life. I couldn't work 12-15 hours at the job because I would have to leave and work 4 hours at another job.

Something happened along the way, though. Somehow I forgot about the wall that long-distance runners hit when their glucose levels dip too low and they feel like they want to lay down and cry. I hit the wall. I couldn't wait until 10pm to eat. I felt like an out-of-shape runner trying to do a 10k. I don't have the same endurance that I did when I worked two jobs in New Hampshire. I require more sleep now and certainly more daily calories than before. While eyeing the red tile under a breakfast table for a cozy spot to lay my head, I thought, "I need to start training for this. I need protein snacks and shot of glucose every 3-4 hours. I need more water and maybe Gatorade. Maybe then I'll be able to make it until 10pm without breaking three wine glasses and a ceramic vase."