Sunday, August 17, 2014

Left hand doesn't know what right hand is doing

And the right hand is half numb and ain't tellin' anybody.

I've been so out of communication with people.  It has even contributed to an attack of depression.  So much health crap going on for months.  I've got a lot of splainin' (channeling my inner Ricky Ricardo for a moment) to do.

But right now it isn't really that easy to type so I'm just going to explain the latest thing, which is what is making hard to type...and then I will have this all written out here so when anyone asks me about it I can give them the link to this instead of trying to type it again.

On June 23 something happened to me while in physical therapy.  I did not know exactly what had happened but I did know I had sudden terrible pain in my right shoulder and arm.  I was immediately iced and told how to use ice liberally at home and of course to see a doctor. My primary care doc was out of town.  But the next day I was able to go with Don to a local rheumatologist who is also a friend.  He was very kind to inject my shoulder joint.  It was Don's birthday so Don and I then had lunch with my mom--and then I went home for more of the ice and rest routine.

The joint injection did help a lot.  Kept me at the level of sobbing instead of screaming.  But this thing really hurt.  I've spent the better part of the last two months lying on my left side in bed, with my useless right arm lying on top of my right side.  Lots of ice.  Moving periodically to avoid frozen shoulder.  And using the left arm all the time aggravated a chronic rotator cuff injury in the left shoulder.  So I couldn't do a whole heck of a lot of anything.

Back to the chronology, I got a TENS unit on the 26th, from the PT ppl, and that helped the pain for when I had no choice but to do something like drive to a medical appt.  I would have given a kingdom, if I had kingdoms to wrap up and give away left and right, for someone to drive me.  Sometimes I would pull over just to sob from the pain.

The house is a disaster area and I'm now having asthma problems, don't want to end up back in the hospital for them again, like I was in March, need to hire help cleaning, they have to go behind the furniture so I assume $$$ and I'll need manna from heaven, ok don't think about things like that right before bedtime, but I sure as heck am not going to be sterilizing this place and moving furniture when  just signing my name on insurance forms still hurts.  Poor Don has to do all the laundry and putting stuff away on top of everything else he does...

And my summer projects are going to have to be my next spring projects :)


There's more and I will write about this again soon.  But the injury is letting me know in its own special way to stop typing now!

I had a second shoulder injection from my rheumatologist down in LA.  Don had to go with me to apply ice packs!  This injection helped.  So I must have had something go wrong with the shoulder joint.  Also, some of the very tender areas in the shoulder and arm are starting to get better after all these weeks...tendons, maybe?

But I still have pain and, as I had from the very beginning, numbness in my right thumb and index finger.  My betta fish loves it because I sometimes give him too much of his pellet food.

On Thursday I finally got my appt with a neck specialist.  I have a cervical herniated disk.

I'm supposed to get more physical therapy, ha!  Full circle.

(And come back in a month, I am not out of the woods yet.)

(And we will see if I can have any more PT this year on my insurance. Insurance doesn't care if your trying to preserve arm and hand function, what's it to them?)

About Me

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I've travelled the distance from an Ivy League college to decades of enforced poverty--because I've needed to qualify for government health care in the U.S., since being diagnosed with lupus at the age of 23. I have a personal blog at http://beepbeep.livejournal.com that I've had so long I'm probably stuck with :) My other blogs are here on blogger...