The Pain that Keeps on Giving...

Not many of you know this, but I have had a hurt back for the past fourteen years or so. It started as a sports injury that hurt for a while then went away after resting and didn't bother me again for five or six years. Then I re-injured my back, thankfully after I came home from Panama, in another sports accident. Since then, it has been an on again, off again recurring pain. In 2009 however, it stopped doing the "off again" portion and became a continuous pain that only wavered in level of relative pain.

So I finally decided to do something about it. First, six months ago, I went to a general family doctor and he prescribed me Gabapentin. This is a medicine for Epileptics to control seizures. It is also used to control nerve pain. The most interesting thing about this drug is a sentence from the medical information page that comes with the drug when you pick it up. It reads, "It is not known how Gabapentin controls seizures or reduces nerve pain." This sentence is printed directly after the paper tells me that this medicine is used to control seizures and nerve pain. Damn, I love modern medicine.

Last week, after switching insurance from my company's sucky one to Vanina's amazing insurance, I got an MRI and went to a back/joint specialist (all covered). He reviewed my MRI and told me that I have Herniated Nucleus Pulposus (Spinal Disc Herniation) with nerve impingement in my L4.5 disk (my sciatic nerve). Basically this means I am in pain all the time but my pain spikes and shoots down my leg when I bend over forward or lift objects weighing more than a few pounds.

The doctor has prescribed me to get a Spinal Injection (yes think Epidural) of Cortisone, and go to Physical Therapy afterward. Hopefully, the injection will reduce the inflammation (and pain) in my back allowing me enough time (months) to complete my physical therapy regimen and strengthen my core muscles so my back won't return to the way it is now.

I'm scheduled for this spinal tap on Thursday. Wish me luck.

It was retarded...

So I was talking to a friend last night, not about anything in particular but about "anything and everything" instead. It made for some interesting topics.

One of the topics was how we seem to got blamed for the misdeeds and "Faux Pas" of our friends when they would screw up during our formative years. Those doing the blaming are usually parents but sometimes significant others and siblings too. It made me laugh when after considering the myriad ways that these people could have gotten themselves out of the situations that (arguably) we helped put them in she just sumed it all up by saying, "It was retarded."

I havn't laughed that hard in some time.

Speaking of laughing hard, I was reading a blog post from a professional blogger on Cnet. The post refers to a PMS tracker men can use to keep track of the women in their lives. I didn't start laughing until I got to the part where it starts explaining about competing products in the market. Here is an excerpt:

"Take the competing app PMSTracker. "Tired of your wife/girlfriend/sister/mom/secretary biting your head off unexpectedly once a month?" the app summary on iTunes asks prospective buyers. Another one, called uPMS, markets itself as "an application for all guys out there suffering the monthly Psychotic Mood Shifts from their better halves."

Another winner is IAmAMan, an app for "your private life planning." Like PMSTracker, it lets men track cycles of multiple females, but has the additional handy feature of offering passwords for each female so that if one of them "accidentally bumps into this application and makes you enter the password--she will be the only one to appear on the list." Good thinking!"

Oh man, I started laughing pretty hard. I'm not sure everyone will appreciate the humor I find in this type of application, but to those people I say, "Lighten up!"

Anyway, I'm back. I'll try to post on a much more regular basis now.