Irony Board

So often it seems that Friday is the day that irony settles over our happy home. Maybe it’s because by then, my mind catches up to what I’ve been doing to my body all week. Or maybe it’s all a coincidence; who the hell knows.

Either way, anyone who knows me well knows that for about four weeks now, I’ve been struggling with the same stupid pain in whatever flesh is anchoring my hip to my back (mainly, this is a big fat pain in my not-so-fat ass). Answers to what is causing this are in short supply, but all of my bodyworkers think they have a solution. Spine-oriented sorts think it’s in my spine, muscle-oriented sorts think it’s in my muscles, body-mind connection types think (and I was leaning this way, too) that it’s something with an emotional component, as in someone or something in my life is a pain in the ass. My PT (not a pain in the ass, but someone whom I’ve been trusting for over a year to have the answers) is stumped, and recommended cutting my exercise/stretching routine to every other day and using more ice and possibly, a referral to pain management where I will get shot up with cortisone, a route down which I do NOT want to travel. But whatever most of my team has been doing - be it needles or massage or joint manipulation – has only been making the afflicted area angrier.

And during all of this, sleep has also been in short supply. Fearing a return to last year’s Summer of Endless Nocturnal Torment followed by subsequent physical breakdown, my GP (who sometimes can be counted on for an answer) finally decided that the sleep study I’ve been bugging him about for a year might be a good idea.

So it is prescribed, so it will be done.

Meanwhile, (more specifically, Wednesday at 9 AM) I decided to hell with all of them. I was tired of therapies that made this worse (isn’t the caveat of the medical community “first, do no harm?”), tired of the reduced exercise program having no effect, tired of not being able to stretch (one of the few things that’s been bringing me relief from the fibro), so I called once again on my GP. Maybe someone had missed something. Maybe I should get another MRI.

I saw the Physician’s Assistant, who in many ways was more thorough and patient than my GP. She gave me a physical evaluation that rivaled the ones my neurosurgeon used to inflict on me, minus getting poked with pins (he used to do this to determine nerve sensitivity). She didn’t think I needed another MRI, nor would my insurance company pay for one if pain wasn’t radiating down my legs. But she did suggest that I was having some sciatic inflammation.

Which made more sense than what anyone else was telling me.

So it’s back to the horse-pill anti-inflammatories and the muscle relaxants. And, in a few weeks, or earlier if my good good friend Linda can work some magic with Tom’s schedule, it’s back to physical therapy, now that we have a new road map.

And the irony is that, for now, the medication is making me sleep like the dead.

And the sleep study is scheduled for Monday night.

And even though Husband gave me shit about why I was bothering to get this done at all, that it would only result in no new answers like every other test and doctor I’ve been to (don’t worry, I gave him shit back), I was sort of looking forward to this one. For scientific purposes. Getting covered with electrodes and going to sleep while an intern monitored my respiration, heart rate, brainwaves, etc. from another room and generated roughly 900 pages of data (or so the information packet claimed) to try to figure out why, if I actually get to sleep, why I can’t seem to stay asleep.

They were even going to let me wear my penguin jammies (if you laugh I’ll hunt you down and kill you).

I was going to blog about it, or maybe even use it as a basis for a magazine article.

But I guess I can always reschedule.