I was 14, and it was Spring of freshman year of high school. I was about 5’5” and a little scrawny in some places and a little pudgy in others. Not much of an athlete, I spent a lot of my time slogging bits and bytes and other geeky things thinking about what I was going to do as soon as I could take the tests to leave high school early.
In PE, we were doing wrestling and the teacher was one of the biggest jack asses I’d ever had. In pairing us up he decided it would be funny to have my 115ish pound self wrestle a 5’ 9” 220ish pound gorilla. In the first few seconds I found myself lifted entirely off the mat and slammed down on my right side. Everyone including the teacher burst out laughing and I struggled to get up having had the wind knocked out of me and sharp pain traveling throughout my shoulder and arm. The teacher yelled at me to get up and I complained something was wrong with my shoulder. He told me to walk it off so I walked off and straight to the office to have them call my mother to come get me. When they initially refused I think I started screaming at them about what had happened. We didn’t have a school nurse so they just called my house and about 15 minutes later my sister and her boyfriend turned up to get me and then took me to see the doctor. An x-ray showed I had what looked like a hairline fracture and the doctor put my arm in a sling and told me not to use it for a few weeks.
It seemed to be fine after that and I had stopped dressing for PE at that point (while I was gone my locker was broken into anyway and everything stolen, including the lock) and I was sent to walk around the basketball courts all period with the small group of other kids who couldn’t be bothered to give a shit about passing PE or getting out of high school with a diploma. Eventually, I just stopped showing up altogether, not that I attended much to begin with. I think I showed up for about 45 days of high school in total for grades 9 and 10.
Flash forward about 9 years later. I was 23 and was moving from San Francisco to New York. A lot of stuff was getting boxed up, hauled out, given away or sent to storage in a short period of time. A week before leaving, I spent a day with my shoulder not feeling too good. I brushed it off since over the years here and there I’d had nagging pains in the shoulder, my neck and jaw but never thought much of them. One time moving I had some serious issues in my neck and went to a doctor who just gave me some muscle relaxants and sent me on my way. The problem corrected itself in about a week. This time however, something was really wrong. I tried to sleep but the pain just kept getting worse. I’d munched multiple advil over a series of a few hours with nothing stopping the agony when finally I moved to the floor to try and lay flat on my back to see if it would help. My partner at the time woke up and wanted to know what was wrong since i had left the bed and I described the problem. He decided it was time to go the hospital and they got me in, took an x-ray, saw nothing on it, gave me a vicodin and and a prescription for 20 more and sent me on my way.
After a couple days in bed and a vicodin every 6 hours it seemed to get better and by the time we were leaving for New York, it seemed to have resolved itself so I didn’t really pay much bother to it again.
Over the next decade I’d engage in some heavy exertion of one form or another and get the nagging pains in the shoulder that would resolve after a couple days and I just figured I pulled a muscle or something and thought little of it since I hadn’t had an episode that left me writhing on the ground in pain again. I never really complained to a doctor about it again since I had more issues with my jaw, inability to sleep a lot of the time and high levels of stress and anxiety induced by work and relationships.
Almost up to the current time, just under a year ago I had a nasty fall in the back yard and broke my left ankle. After it was in a cast a couple weeks later I lost balance and fell over again. This put me on crutches for about 9 1/2 weeks. I struggled with them quite a bit and figured it was just lack of upper body strength. When I finally got to the point where I could walk with one crutch and was going to physical therapy, I had to walk with it under my right arm. One time walking to physical therapy by the time I got there my shoulder was killing me a bit more than my ankle and they put a hot pack on it to help it while working on the ankle. After I was downgraded to a cane it became easier to get around and I didn’t think anything of the issue I was having with my shoulder. When I finished PT for the ankle and was walking again I had a couple minor flareups on the shoulder and just figured I slept on it wrong and it resolved within a couple days. By September I was well recovered and decided it was time to start trying to get back into shape. I had booked a room at MAL and wanted to shave off some of the size that I had gained while sitting around on my ass watching TV with the bad ankle.
Things didn’t go so well. I managed to force myself to lift every other day for about 3 weeks and my right shoulder would click and pop doing nearly every upper body exercise. It also hurt a bit when I’d use my arms to support my head while doing crunches. I just figured I was out of shape and it would take a little while to get used to it. By the end of the 3rd week I was walking away from the weight bench feeling worse and worse and so I justified in my mind stopping for a bit. I made a couple more attempts at it in October but still had the same clicking and popping problem in my shoulder and would walk away in pain. I had finally made an appointment to go see my doctor to get something to help with sleep since my sleep schedule got really screwed up while I was sitting around idle a lot with the ankle issues and I brought it up with him. He told me to go see a specialist about it and I of course didn’t really heed his advice. In the final weeks of the year I made one more last ditch effort to try and start working out figuring I might at least be able to shave a few pounds off to fit into a smaller pair of jeans having finally broken down to buy some larger size pants just for work and I walked away from the bench with my shoulder killing me enough that I had to bum a muscle relaxant off my boyfriend. At that point he made me make an appointment to see a doctor about the problem for the week between Christmas and New Year’s.
I went to the doctor and he did a physical exam and took x-rays. As expected, everything looked fine on the x-rays but he did notice that I had very poor range of motion in my right arm compared to the left. He suspected it was the rotator cuff but didn’t know if it was just injured, stiff or torn. He didn’t believe it was a full tear since I could still use my arm and he wrote me a prescription for high octane Aleve and for physical therapy. I was in major pain for about a week after his physical exam but thanks to a good friend, had a supply of Nurofen Plus (12.8mg codeine + 200mg ibuprofen) brought over from London and used that to get through the week.
I finally made an appointment for the PT evaluation in the second week of January right before heading off to MAL and during the appointment the therapist noticed several things that he just wasn’t happy about in terms of when and how he manipulated my arm and it would pop and click. He was making the face that I could almost hear him thinking that this was a much more serious problem than initially thought. I left the session feeling like hell and spent most of MAL quietly suffering and drinking heavily to numb the pain since my codeine supply was dwindling and I wanted to try and save them for after the PT sessions.
After returning I faithfully went to 2 sessions a week for 2 1/2 weeks and each time I left I was getting worse rather than better. It had gone from being an ache localized in the shoulder to something seriously wrong where pain was shooting from the shoulder up into my neck and down my back. I wasn’t even doing much in therapy beyond 3 exercises with resistance and 2 stretches. I had run out of codeine and that wasn’t really helping much anyway. It would mask the problem for a few hours but the pain would come back with vengeance as soon as it was wearing off 4 hours later. Several nights after therapy even with a Xanax stacked on top of the codeine I couldn’t sleep. The last session I went to I bummed another muscle relaxant off the boyfriend because I couldn’t even lift my arm without pain shooting in random directions up the neck or across my back. This was a Friday so I had to wait all weekend until Monday to play phone tag with the doctor to complain about the issue and try to get muscle relaxants. At that point he sent me in for an MRI that I did on the Friday before last and then scheduled a follow up with him to go over the results.
He did another physical exam and talked to me a little about what I was doing in physical therapy and how it was going to which I admitted I had stopped because it just kept getting worse. At this point since he hadn’t dove into the MRI results I was assuming they didn’t find anything. Then he pulled the results out and went over them with me. What they found caught me off guard because of his initial approach…there was definitely a partial tear in the rotator cuff that looked a bit old and about 70% of the tendon is detached from the bone. There’s also some inflammation and bursitis that they found that is definitely contributing to the pain. He gave me 3 options: do nothing and live with it, cortisone injections and continue physical therapy to try and strengthen and increase the range of motion with what’s still attached or surgery.
We were in agreement that doing nothing wasn’t an option because the amount of pain I’ve been enduring over the past few months and the frustration of not being able to do anything to get back in shape without hurting myself was just not acceptable. He’s obviously taking the conservative approach and talked me into at least taking a cortisone shot and giving PT a try again a week from now to see if it starts to help, then come back in 2 months to check in and explore the last option if it isn’t improving.
After talking to quite a few people about it in the past 24 hours, everyone is in agreement that at my age I should just go for the surgery. I’m sure for insurance purposes I need to go through a little more physical therapy to prove that it’s not helping and then be able to get the surgery without them raising hell about having to cover it. I’m also on a major project at work that needs to finish up in early April which is around the time I should be checking back in with the doctor. I’m planning to setup an appointment for PT for next week and have a candid chat with the therapist if it’s even worth burning through a bunch of PT visits when I’m most likely going to need them post surgery and I only get 60 per year. I’ve been doing a lot of reading on partial tears and the general rule is they don’t usually do surgery unless more than 50% of the tendon is detached since at that point they treat it as a reattachment and with less than 50% detached they usually recommend just going the PT route.
I’m seriously concerned that with that much of the cuff detached, is PT really going to help that much? Is it going to just be a few weeks of pain until I give up and can schedule a surgical solution? It seems inevitable since I doubt I can gain that much strength in the shoulder with that much of the tendon (and the muscle it’s connected to) detached. In any event that’s the long story of where things are at right now.
CANCER [June 21–July 22] On average, an adult has sex 103 times a year. But I’m guessing that in the immediate future, Cancerians everywhere might be motivated to exceed that rate by a large margin. The astrological omens suggest that your tribe’s levels of sensual desire might reach astronomical heights. Do you know anyone you’re attracted to who might be willing help you out as you follow your bliss? If not, be your own Valentine.
Former roommate: CBGB cycling jersey??!? What has the world come to?!?
Me: OMFUG! That makes me ill!
*drumroll please!*
1 package artificially flavored vanilla instant pudding
2 cups milk
1 loaf wonder bread
1 tub cool whip, defrosted
1 tub chocolate frosting
Preparation:
Prepare instant pudding according to package directions, stir in tub of cool whip and set aside. For each eclair, use 1 slice wonder bread and spread a thin layer of pudding on top of slice, top with a second slice of wonder bread and then frost the top with a thin layer of chocolate frosting. Slice each eclair in half length wise. Makes enough servings for your guests to hate you for a week.
So, it’s the end of the year and I decided to go through and clear out some people from the friendlist on my mainstream profile. Rather than just “unfriend” these people I opted for blocking them. Some of them, it’s just easier to not see them online (now that I don’t even see them in real life) and while unsubscribed, whenever I’d hunt through my f-list for someone or go through the phone book on my phone to find someone they’d keep popping up. We don’t talk to each other, we don’t comment on facebook to each other, what purpose does it serve to have this clutter in my digital life?
That said, searching through the list multiple times to block about 8 people (that’s a pretty low number compared to the past) it was a little startling to keep scrolling past the 2 people I’m connected to who are no longer with us in this world. They appear in my phone book as well and sometimes it’s a little startling scrolling past them but I can’t bring myself to remove them. To remove them would be to forget them and forgetting them is not what I’m about. It’s a bit of paradoxical thinking on my part since when I bite it, all I want is a big party for the people who knew me and then I want to be erased from everyone’s collective memory. A bit selfish, I know, but it’s in many ways fitting to who I am.
I have spent 2 years now ruling my financial life with an iron fist. Okay, so the fist has an iron core and has a healthy coating of the padding that Nerf toys are made of, but for the most part, I’ve been living well within my means and debts I’ve taken on in short term have been turned around in minimal amounts of time and financed under very good terms (0% interest for the most part.)
That said, there’s the section of the budget that’s really hard to get a firm grip on: food, household supplies, pharmacy, personal care and in some cases, clothing. The problem is not spending too much on these items, it’s getting a firm handle on exactly how much is spent on a monthly basis in these categories.
The fly in the ointment is the dreaded “hypermarkets” of Wal*Mart and Target. Most of the stuff I get in those categories comes from one of these 2 places now that I’m out in the suburbs. While I’ve been haggling to get the food portion of that clump out by getting in the occasional trips to Stew Leonard’s in Yonkers and the clothing portion is very haphazzard (I can get just about anything I’d get at either Wal*Mart or Target in the “cheap everyday clothes” category at Sears for a slightly higher price) there are things that we get that we just need now and don’t have the energy and patience to run around to different stores to get.
Remembering to set the receipts aside and then itemize them out in my budgeting software is a royal pain in the ass and in the rush of life some of these get lost in the shuffle and I end up with the dreaded “Shopping (other)” entry in my budgeting software and I have no idea how much was for each of the categories. It annoys me since I’d really like to know just how much we’re spending in each of those categories so I can factor out what a total budget looks like since we don’t have to buy a pair of pants, a jumbo size bottle of laundry detergent or face scrub every month. We do have to get milk, fruits and veggies, and other foodstuffs at least every other week.
The reason for this complaint is it’s just more convenient when I forget I’m running out of something to run to one of these places and grab it. Wal*Mart usually has the better prices but Target is closer to home. Wal*Mart is 24 hours so we can go when it’s less busy at 11pm but then we remember it’s dreadful since they shut down all but 2 registers and we spend as much time standing in line for checkout as we do shopping.
I’d like to move the personal care and pharmacy category off the clump and just preplan and shop for things through drugstore.com and purchase 3 month supplies at a time so it becomes a quarterly number but for some things, Wal*Mart just has better prices.
These dreadful places are just not going to go away so I guess I’ll have to suck it up and live with the clump of “Shopping (other)” *gag*
So some mommy who is oh so PC and lovin’ the gays has a problem with a ManHunt ad for an app to find a casual hookup at 0 feet away. I don’t agree with her reasoning for wanting the billboards to come down but will give my own: put down your damn phone and socialize! I’ve watched a disturbing pattern over the past year as these kinds of apps catch on where people are spending more and more time cruising the people who are near them through their pictures on the phone rather than just looking with their own eyes. Rather than starting a conversation with someone across the bar by smiling, walking up…the classic eye fucking, etc. instead they start sending instant messages to each other.
At what point will the whole reason for going to a bar be to sit in a corner on your phone ogling the pictures of other people sitting around on their phones having conversations via IM rather than actually looking at the people around you and having verbal conversations???
That’s hooked up to my office calendar. It can have a little countdown to the next meeting cluster that’s color coded: green = enough time to grab food, yellow = enough time to lengthen my attention span (restroom and/or nicotine), red = you’re lucky if you have time to run and grab a glass of water. I should also color code the duration of meeting cluster in colors. green = 30 minutes or less, yellow = 1 hour or less, orange = less than 2 hours, red = dear fucking Chaos will the madness ever end???
I wish our conference line worked like our video conferences too. The video conferences have little pop ups and dings that let you know how much time you have left to wrap things up and then when you hit the time limit, it just drops the call. Shame we can’t set time limits on our voice conferences like that so it would just hang up on everyone once the time limit is reached! Even better if you could send a screeching alarm through the earpiece of someone who is rambling on for too long about nothing with the push of a button to shut them the hell up!
…make no fucking sense! I can get a round trip from JFK - LAX for 25,000 miles on a standard “saver” award. Using the Dynamic Air Awards that trip is 30,000 miles. For an LAX-SFO award, it’s 20,000 miles using Dynamic Air Awards vs. 25,000 using saver. That said, it makes no sense to blow 20,000 miles on such a short trip when the cash fare is really cheap and there’s lots of competition on the route just as it makes no sense to pay 5,000 more miles going cross country on a “Dynamic” award when you can easily get a saver award on the same route where it makes sense to sometimes use miles rather than cash.
It’s also very confusing since you can only use “Dynamic” awards within the continental US. Granted they mention you can pay less miles than an anytime award which has no capacity limits compared to the saver awards but I’ve had no trouble finding saver awards in the past. I guess maybe I’m just not the target market since I use reward tickets for vacations and am flexible with dates and times to minimize the number of miles used. *shrug*