Sunday, November 30, 2014

'Tis the Season (20 Weeks + 6 Days)

I mentioned in my last post that I've been ridiculously sick for two weeks now. I started taking an antibiotic on Wednesday and that has helped a lot, but I haven't had a good night's sleep in, like, forever due to incessant coughing. But that's not actually what I came here to write about.

My hips. are. killing. me.

And I'm really unhappy about this. In fact, I sort of want to cry. It's not the pain so much as the reality that is sinking in that I'm basically not any better off than I was before the surgery. I know I've had a lot of ups and downs since surgery, and I'm currently in a 'down,' but I also had a lot of ups and downs before surgery. And... the pain that I've been having for the past week is exactly the same as the pain I had before the surgery. And... my snapping hip has returned with a vengeance. WTF?

When I think about the fact that post-surgery I have had a cortisone injection and have regularly been taking either a pain killer or anti-inflammatory or both, it's actually possible that I'm worse off than before the surgery. Also, my left hip didn't hurt pre-surgery, nor did I have 'chronic thrombus.' So all in all, this is an epic fail. While I'm thankful that this is nothing life-threatening, and not even something that threatens my daily routine (unless you count extreme grouchiness due to chronic pain as a disruption), I'm starting to feel a little bit uneasy about all of this.

At this point, my uneasiness mostly centers around feelings of what do I do now? I'm obviously super duper anti-surgery at this point, but at the same time, I have this level of pain that OMGIcannotlivewith for another 40 years. I mean, it's the same pain I had that led me to have surgery in the first place. At the same time, PT hasn't helped and cortisone injections and cortisone patches haven't helped, so what can I do? If this is as good as it gets, that's, well... depressing.

I think a lot of things are contributing to my current levels of pain. One is that I stopped taking meloxicam again. When I started taking an antibiotic on Wednesday, along with cough medicine + Xarelto + Vitamin D, somehow it just seemed like too many pills. I started to feel like my mother-in-law, so I temporarily ditched the meloxicam. I understand there is absolutely no logic behind this, I'm just sort of phobic of pharmaceuticals in general. I guess the good news is that the meloxicam does seem to help, because both times I've stopped taking it, my hip pain gets worse. The bad news is that I feel like four months post-surgery, I should not be this reliant on medication to get me through the day, especially considering I've also had a cortisone injection that should be keeping the inflammation in check. Part of the reason I opted to have the surgery is so I wouldn't have to rely on pain medications and anti-inflammatories for the next 40 years. So while I do realize I could start taking meloxicam again, and that it would probably help, that doesn't fix the cause, just the symptoms. (And over break, I just finished reading The Story of the Human Body, so I'm very much into treating causes as opposed to managing symptoms.)

The other contributing factor to my pain is that I've been trying to do a lot of yard work this weekend. I normally take very good care of our yard, but I wasn't able to this summer. Our yard got very overgrown and slightly embarrassing. Since we had some warm weather over Thanksgiving break, I at least wanted to clean up all the dead vegetation and put the yard to sleep for winter in a proper manner. Unfortunately, the squatting down and bending over associated with yard work has resulted in ridiculous amounts of pain. I know my physical therapist would tell me not to do things that cause pain, but I really don't feel like squatting down to pull up crab grass or pick up leaves should be causing this much pain at this point. Again... WTF?

So here I am. And I have no idea what to do.

Wednesday, November 26, 2014

The Never-Ending Cough (20 Weeks + 2 Days)

Ever since my orthopedist told me to ditch the Xarelto, and I decided to ignore him, I've been meaning to schedule an actual follow-up appointment with my husband's PCP to, I don't know, discuss a plan? Although I informally consulted several other medical professionals regarding their thoughts on continuing Xarelto despite improvement in my DVT, and all agreed on a minimum of three months, I never got a formal opinion. I figured that at the very least, I would need my husband's doctor to write a script for my Xarelto, since I could hardly ask my orthopedist to renew it after he told me to stop taking it. I just hadn't gotten around to it yet, mostly because I'm not out of Xarelto yet. (Thank you, drug reps, for free samples. :))

However, I saw my husband's doctor this morning, because I have been hideously sick for 10 days now and finally realized that I was getting worse, not better. On Monday, after a week of constant nose blowing + the Xarelto, the blood vessels in my nose finally rebelled, causing The Mother Of All Nosebleeds, at least in my adult life. (I've had worse as a child; one time the bleeding required having all the blood sucked out of my nose and then having my nostril cauterized.) Anyway, my husband texted Dr. A last night to see if he was seeing patients today, and if so, if he could squeeze me in. Since my husband took the day off and the kids don't have school, we slept in this morning (although, due to my coughing, I'm not sure either one of us has actually slept for real in several days). We both 'woke up' around 7:30, at which point my husband checked his phone and told me Dr. A would see me 8:30. It turns out that Dr. A was not actually seeing patients today, but agreed to squeeze me in between paperwork. I only later found out that my husband's text was: My wife has a marriage-ending cough. Is there any way you can see her tomorrow? LOL.

Since Dr. A was doing me a huuuuuuge favor, I decided it would not be an appropriate time to bring up the blood clot. However, he brought it up on his own. (I used to see his PA, who has now moved, so he has all my records.) After diagnosing me with having 'The Crap,' he asked how my right leg was doing. I launched into an abridged version of the saga, and he reiterated that while he did not want to insult anyone, according to his training, I should be on Xarelto for six months, at which point we should do another ultrasound. He also thought that it might not be a bad idea to have a lab workup of my blood done, just to make sure I don't have any clotting disorders or anything funky, and we can also check cholesterol and all that fun stuff. Since I can't have that done while on Xarelto, we should schedule that for approximately two weeks after I stop taking it. That means sometime in February. He asked me if my orthopedist had told me why he thought it was a good idea for me to stop taking Xarelto and I told him I got the feeling my orthopedist just wanted me to go away already.

Finally, he asked me how my hip was, and I told him it felt pretty much the same as it did before the surgery, and added that I thought I might need a new orthopedist. He said labrums were notoriously finicky, then asked if I'd had an arthrogram of my hip, with contrast dye. I told him I hadn't, and he said in his experience, straight up MRIs weren't that useful for hips - and added, 'I don't mean any offense to anyone.' The funny thing is that it is his former PA, Sarah, who ordered the MRI, which I told him. I didn't say it in an obnoxious way, just an FYI way. He semi-frowned, then flipped through my records, and pulled up a page with a sticky note on it, and said, 'Yup, here it is.' Then he read the sticky note out loud to me - apparently a note he had written: Sarah - an MRI for a hip is of limited usefulness without contrast dye. LOL. OOPS. I do miss Sarah, though, even if she didn't order the dye.

At any rate, he was very prompt and very thorough, and spent about 20 minutes with me, which I really appreciate considering he was seeing me on a day when he wasn't even seeing patients, and I'm not even really his patient. I finally understood why my husband likes this guy so much. Yesterday, when I was at the pediatrician's with my daughter for her annual checkup, I was thinking how funny it is that almost all of our primary care providers are old-school doctors - as I've told my husband before, old white men. Ha. These are usually solo practitioners who still do things like give out their home phone numbers and do house calls. They don't have fancy patient portals, and when you pay them, you actually write a check out to them and send it to their physical address, and not some place in Phoenix or Chicago. I've calculated that our pediatrician must be almost the same age as my long-dead grandparents, and I dread the day when he retires (or dies), because he is just fabulous, and I love him. (The pediatrician we had before him was the same way, and he did retire.) I think part of why it's so hard for me to deal with orthopedists is because they are, like, the opposite of the old-school style I'm drawn to. It is the huge corporation versus the mom and pop corner store. Interestingly, our old pediatrician once saw me limping when I brought my daughter in and wanted to know what was wrong. At the time, I was having a lot knee pain, so he referred me to one of his orthopedist friends, a solo practitioner orthopedist. (You just don't see many of those anymore.) I remember being shocked when the orthopedist himself came out into the waiting room to get me - no nurse or MA, just him. He was fabulous, but unfortunately, like most other doctors of this type, he is retired. Now, don't get me wrong, I appreciate the modern techniques and know-how of the orthopedists in the Gigantic Orthopedic Conglomerates, and I understand that no one hopes for a long-term relationship with an orthopedist the way they might hope for a long-term relationship with a primary care provider. At the same time, I could not help but note the stark contrast between my time spent with Dr. A and the time spent with my orthopedist. While modern orthopedic techniques are indeed amazing, it seems like throwing in a little bit of old-fashioned medicine might go a long way.

Sunday, November 16, 2014

Food for Thought (18 Weeks + 6 Days)

Like most of the country, we have been in a cold snap for the past week. And not just cold, but really cold, for here anyway. I've been worried about walking around on slippery sidewalks and just the cold weather in general. But... oddly enough, my hips seem to enjoy the cold weather. Maybe it's like they are being constantly iced, LOL. At any rate, they've actually been feeling quite good since I last wrote. Weird. But weird in a good way, right?

In other news, due to the cold weather, I've been spending more time on the Internet than usual, trolling random blogs related to random (and sometimes not so random) topics that are of interest to me. I'm in the midst of having what may or may not be an 'aha' moment, but is interesting to note regardless of whether it's relevant or not. In reading other hip blogs, I've noticed that several of them are by people who have hip problems due to Ehlers-Danlos syndrome (EDS), which is a connective tissue/collagen disorder. There are several types of EDS, of which the mildest is Type III - hypermobility syndrome. The reason this sticks in my mind is because my daughter has actually been diagnosed with EDS - Type III. It was a long time ago, and at the time, we had so many other things going on with her that I never really thought twice about it. In fact, I went back and read my journal from the visit that we had with the geneticist who diagnosed her, and I didn't even write about that diagnosis. And apparently we even had a follow-up with the doctor that I didn't even find worthy of a journal entry. However, a few days ago, I was cleaning out my file cabinet and came across a folder full of medical reports from when my daughter was young. The doctor wrote: Given N's personal and family history of hypermobility, I diagnosed her with Ehlers-Danlos syndrome type III, otherwise known as benign hypermobility syndrome. I believe this to be the cause of a significant portion of her motor development delay... I would like N to be seen by a pediatric neurologist to try to differentiate any hypotonia from her extreme joint hypermobility.

There are a couple reasons I didn't think much of the EDS diagnosis, one of those being that the doctor didn't make a big deal about it. The other reason is because I'm not sure I really believed her. EDS - Type III is inherited in an autosomal dominant manner, which means that either I or my husband would have to have it to pass it down. And since the question of whether either I or my husband had EDS didn't come up, I guess I just figured the doctor was just sort of making stuff up, ha ha. Now, I guess on some level I realize that you don't get to be a pediatric geneticist at a reputable research hospital if you are in the habit of making stuff up, but at the same time, there were many other concerns on the table at the time, obviously the least of which was EDS. At the same time, it's not as if I've had such awesome experiences with doctors that I believe everything they tell me, and in my experience, most people's understanding of basic science is so limited, it has made a lot of health care providers lazy about their medical knowledge, or at least how they convey that knowledge. Another consideration is that mutations can arise de novo (meaning neither my husband nor I would have to have the condition), and in fact my daughter does have a de novo chromosomal duplication. So that is always a possibility.

On the other hand, now that I think about it, it is absolutely not out of the question that I might also this condition. What actually got me thinking about it was the fact the one of the blogs I stumbled across was a teenage girl with hip pain. She had a couple of failed hip surgeries, which is what actually led to the diagnosis of EDS; because of EDS, her tendons and ligaments were too lax to keep the joint in place after surgery. It is also worth noting that because EDS is due to a collagen defect, and collagen is present throughout the body, EDS is associated with other issues, notably with the heart and the GI tract. My daughter does have some heart issues (which actually baffled the pediatric cardiologist we saw) and GI issues (which a pediatric gastroenterologist said 'to keep an eye on'), and I also have heart and GI issues I have never really pursued, just because these are hard things to pursue when you barely ever go to the doctor. LOL.

At any rate, it is some interesting food for thought.

* * * * *

FYI, here were my impressions after our first visit to the pediatric geneticist:

April 14, 2007

Our meeting with the pediatric geneticist was mostly, as I suspected it would be, uninformative. However, it was much less torturous than I expected it to be, which was a pleasant surprise. I've never been to a research hospital before, which I realize is a good thing, because most of the people there are in a sorry condition. (...)

I have to admit it was really nice, though. The waiting room was like no other waiting room I've ever been in. It was enormous, with lovely toys for kids of all ages. The only other people in the room were two grad students (I presume) trying to recruit children for a study on memory. Our appointment was at 1:00, and when the clock ticked past 1:00 and we still hadn't been called in, I was annoyed considering they had emphasized the importance of us getting there early. However, we got in around 1:10, which I suppose isn't too bad. (Our ped's view on making people wait for appointments is that it is a form of 'medical arrogance.')

At 1:10, a girl wearing jeans and a t-shirt took N in and did all the standard poking, prodding, and measuring, then we went and waited for Dr. K for another five minutes. I had no image in my mind of what a pediatric geneticist MD would be like, but I was still definitely surprised when the doctor came in. First of all, Dr. K was, like, my age (literally, as it turns out), and secondly, she was wearing a fancy Chinese-ish looking shirt and nice slacks.

And sandals. Which I wouldn't have noticed, because, after all, who notices a man's shoes? (from 'The Shawshank Redemption') But the first thing she did was apologize, saying she was feeling very self-conscious today. She went on to explain that she liked these sandals so much she bought them in both black and brown. It was dark when she got dressed, and she ended up with one black and one brown. Then she sat down on the examining table with her legs crossed, rummaged through a fancy, Chinese-ish looking handbag (she was not Chinese, but a white farm girl), and pulled out a piece of paper.

Then she commenced taking a family history, first from me, then from E. Mine took all of one minute. I told her I was healthy and had no problems other than having hemoglobin E. Then she asked about my family and I told her I had two brothers, but that we were not genetically related. And that was the end of that. Then it was E's turn. The abridged version of the medical problems in E's family took about 30 minutes. N was tearing around the room the whole time, going back and forth from me to E to me, climbing on the chairs, pulling at the blinds, playing with the sink, and pushing the doctor's chair all over. Finally she demanded to be picked up by Dr. K, which is completely different from how she is with [our normal ped] (screaming hysterically and clinging to me from the minute he walks in the door). Dr. K decided this would be a good time to start her examination.

The very first thing she noticed was her ears, which is funny because we've always joked about how her ears stick out, never realizing that there could be a medical significance. But apparently sticking out ears can be a sign of muscle weakness. Obviously some people's ears just stick out, but since neither mine nor E's do, N's ears are suspect. In fact, Dr. K said her ears are classic 'Charcot' ears, which I recognized as being 'Charcot-Marie-Tooth' disease, although I couldn't remember what it was. However, she didn't seem too concerned because apparently the rest of her did not look 'Charcot.' (Although, I have to say, once I got home and Googled Charcot-Marie-Tooth, I started to wonder.)

After further examination, she exclaimed that N was the most flexible human she had ever seen, which isn't surprising, because she's been practicing for, what, six months? LOL. We've always thought it's logical that N is flexible, because both E and I are extremely flexible, and so N is Ridiculously Flexible. Dr. K said the delays in her gross motor development could definitely be due to the extreme laxity in her joints, especially since her fine motor skills were on par with what they should be for an almost 17-month-old. She also said that her muscle tone was good, which it wouldn't be if she were hypotonic, noting that flexibility concerns the connective tissue, whereas hypotonia concerns the muscles. However, she couldn't rule out that there was something wrong with her muscularly because of her ears and her problems swallowing.

She said that N needed to be evaluated by a speech and swallowing specialist before she could make any decisions about what sort of testing, if any, we should have done. She said it could be that her swallowing problems were unrelated to the gross motor development delays; maybe they were neurological. She also said that even if she had no muscular problems, she could still benefit from physical therapy, so we should have a physical therapist work with her, too.

(...)

Overall it was a good appointment, even though it just confirmed some of the things that we've thought all along. We're going to get a PT referral from [our ped], then go back to see Dr. K in two months. At that point she'll decide if there any genetic tests we should have done. She said if she was going to have N poked, she wanted to make sure she got all the tests done that she wanted, and she didn't want to do tests just to do them, which I appreciate.

Mostly it's a relief, because I was kind of worried that a specialist might take one look at N and say, 'Oh yes, it's obviously such and such' (kind of like the Charcot ears, which would have never occurred to me). But she didn't. She didn't seem overly concerned, which is logical because I'm sure that she sees many kids in much worse shape than N, but still. She didn't seem to think she had any sort of alarming condition and didn't even bring up muscular dystrophy or spinal muscular atrophy, which are the things we were initially concerned about. In fact, she didn't even bat an eye at N's above normal CPK levels.

I'm sitting in a café right now; I'm supposed to be working on a take-home exam, but instead I just spent an hour writing this entry. Ironically, a woman who just had a baby came in. I heard her telling the girl behind the counter that the labor had been very difficult, she had ended up having an emergency hysterectomy, and her daughter (now seven weeks) was still in the hospital. However, she seemed so upbeat and factual about it as she recounted the story. Oh the trials of parenthood. You don't stay strong by choice, you stay strong because you have to.

Tuesday, November 11, 2014

The Weather Outside is Frightful (18 Weeks + 1 Day)

Just some facts, mostly for my own record:
  • On Saturday, I rode my bike for the first time in over four months. It has been so long that I forgot which side the chain was on and rolled up my pant leg on the wrong side. I only rode about two miles total and walked about one mile total. My hip felt fine - or as fine as it ever feels.
  • On Sunday, my hip started killing me - my muscles were super tight despite incessant stretching, and I also felt pain in the hip joint itself, especially when I made a concerted effort to stand with my weight distributed equally between both legs. I'm not sure if this was due to the bike riding (I can't think of why it would be) or just coincidence.
  • This pain has not gone away.
  • My back also hurts. A lot. I'm super bummed about this because one thing I noticed almost immediately after surgery was that my back felt really good. Of course, I wasn't walking at the time, but before surgery, as well as now, my back hurts even when I am just sitting or lying down.
  • I started taking meloxicam again on Friday. I don't think it's helping. My orthopedist also gave me a script for naproxen along with the meloxicam. He said if the meloxicam didn't work then I should try the naproxen. Maybe I will.
  • In trying to come up with explanations for why I suddenly feel so much worse, I've only come up with stopping the meloxicam and possibly the cortisone injection wearing off? Granted, I don't feel like the second cortisone injection actually helped, but maybe it did. Maybe I would have felt way worse without it, and now it's wearing off and I'm feeling, well, way worse.
  • I fell down the stairs a few weeks ago. I mentioned that I have a fear of falling down stairs that isn't totally irrational, because I have actually fallen down stairs a few times, as have my kids. It was a pretty minor fall (hence why I never even wrote out it) - just the last two steps and I think I fell backwards. My quadriceps and my back were what hurt the next day, and the day after that, if I recall correctly. I sort of blew if off because I was actually on my way to my parents' house, and I was rushing - hence the fall. I didn't say anything to my mom about it because she is super annoying about how much she dislikes our house and how scary she thinks our stairs are, and I just didn't feel like listening to her go on and on about our stairs (not that I even disagree, but at a certain point you have to get over it). Anyway, I suppose it's possible the fall did some damage, although I doubt it. I feel like my hip should have started hurting sooner if that were the cause of my current pain, but what do I know. 
  • It is snowing out. The sidewalks are very slippery. This is a little scary. 
I'm starting to lose hope that I'm actually getting better. It's not like all-out panic or anything, and like I've said, I've made friends with my pain. LOL. Nevertheless, it's somewhat deflating.

Friday, November 7, 2014

Book Club on Thursday, Orthopedist on Friday (17 Weeks + 4 Days)

Exactly four months post-surgery

As has become the norm for the past three months, I had book club on Thursday followed by an appointment with my orthopedist on Friday. I wasn't looking forward to the appointment after my display of jerkiness a few weeks ago, plus I knew that nothing would come of the appointment, so I should have just canceled it. But... I didn't. I could have just said I was sorry for the nastygram, but I just couldn't bring myself to apologize because I'm not exactly sorry. I sent multiple polite e-mails requesting follow up communication, and that didn't work, so I felt like I had no choice, other than to just sit around for months with no follow up, which IMHO is Not Okay. I guess I have pretty high expectations when it comes to communication. I spend a few hours a day responding to e-mails, mostly from students, which is important when face-to-face time is limited. Sometimes they don't like my response to them, but... I do always respond, usually within a few hours, and with very few exceptions, almost always within 24 hours.

Anyway, no one said anything about my nastygram, and everyone was very pleasant and cordial. The orthopedist's MA seemed to be trying extra hard to be friendly. When we were walking back to the room, she started off by saying, 'I just have to warn you...' and I immediately thought Uh oh, then anticipated her saying something like, The doctor hates you. However, she was just warning me that she was super busy and hadn't cleaned the room yet, so she was going to need to clean it while I was sitting in there, which she thought would be better than keeping me out in the waiting room. Fortunately, 'cleaning' in an orthopedist's office consists of throwing away the paper that covers the examination table and pulling out more. LOL. She asked me how I was feeling, and I told her I was feeling much better. Then she sort of surprised me and asked if I thought I was actually feeling better or if I was just getting used to the pain, ha ha. I admitted there might be some of that, but that I did think I was genuinely feeling better. I said I had a period of a few weeks when I felt awesome, and I really thought this was finally OVER, but that over the past couple of weeks I've felt the pain creeping back. Nevertheless, I was pretty sure that I still felt better than I did at the last visit.

The MA apparently relayed this information to the orthopedist because when he came in he cheerfully declared, 'Rumor has it you're getting better!' I repeated the information to him, including the pain creeping back, to which he replied, 'No. No creeping is allowed.' LOL. Seriously, I love this guy's personality. It's hard to explain, but on some fundamental level, we really click, which is probably why I was stupid enough to let him operate on me. Even when I want to be really angry with him for being a douchebag of a doctor, I just can't stay mad. Plus, he never keeps me waiting, either, which is always a plus, and a very rare quality among orthopedists (in my experience). He then went through his usual spiel of most people feeling back to normal after three months, but for some people it's six months and others nine months, then just as I was telling him not to even mention the nine-month category to me, he added that hopefully I was in the six month category.

Then I got up onto the examination table so he could do his useless set of 'tests' on me. The MA had told me to put on a pair of those hideous exam shorts in case the doctor wanted to do some manipulations or whatever. I smiled and nodded my head and didn't bother changing, because I didn't feel like it and knew the doctor wasn't going to look that closely. (He has never even looked to see how the incisions healed except when he took the stitches out two weeks post-surgery.) However, he did comment on my shoes, asking me if they were Danskos. I said they were. Then he said he wore Danskos when he operated, and I replied that I didn't know they made Danskos for men. He said somewhat sheepishly that he definitely only wore them during surgery, otherwise he got weird looks. LOL. I told him I had started wearing them when I started teaching back-to-back anatomy labs for six hours straight and needed comfortable, closed-toe shoes. They are the shoes teachers and nurses, and apparently even male orthopedic surgeons, swear by.

Other than the shoe conversation - shoes must be his thing, as I remember him having a conversation about my mom's shoes prior to surgery - highlights include the following:
  • My blood clot is much improved. My doctor apologized for taking a while to get back to me about it (which I appreciated), and then gave me a copy of the report from the radiologist. (He is getting to know me!) He said there was some residual clotting that might never go away (??) but that wasn't enough to keep me on the Xarelto (??) I sort of smiled and nodded my head and didn't mention I had gotten a second and third and fourth opinion about this. 
FINDINGS: The common femoral vein and proximal and mid portions of the superficial femoral vein are normally compressible. In the distal SFV and extending through the popliteal vein, there is chronic thrombus, which causes the vein to be incompletely compressible. This is significantly improved compared to the previous exam. The calf veins are compressible, with no DVT present. 
IMPRESSION: There is residual chronic thrombus in the distal superficial femoral vein and popliteal vein. There has been improvement compared to the previous venous ultrasound study from 8/8/2014.
  • I have trochanteric bursitis in both hips, which I knew. Fortunately, it's not hurting terribly, and according to my doctor, it will magically and spontaneously resolve itself at some undisclosed date in the future. He did mention that we could do cortisone injections to help speed up the healing and when I vigorously shook my head no, he agreed that, 'Yeah, you've already had so many shots.' We also both agreed that going back to PT would not be helpful, as it's actually PT that caused the bursitis in my left hip in the first place, and it's actually feeling much better since I stopped PT. So, I'll just wait it out.
  • When I go from sitting to standing, it hurts, just like it did before surgery (which is what worries me). Supposedly this will also magically and spontaneously resolve itself at some undisclosed date in the future.
  • It still hurts when I flex my hip, although mostly only when I go up stairs, whereas before it hurt when I went down stairs as well. At least the sharp pains I used to have are gone, so that is a happy thing. My doctor said I have some tendonitis, but it seems to be in my sartorius, which is more lateral than the major hip flexors. Not that it really matters, because this too will magically and spontaneously resolve itself at some undisclosed date in the future.
  • I will follow up in two months, at which point hopefully my pain will have magically and spontaneously resolved itself.
  • There is so much to look forward to in the future. :)
  • In writing this, I was trying to think of reasons that my pain seems to be returning, and it dawned on me that I stopped taking the meloxicam a while back because I was having GI issues. Since my GI issues seem to have at least gone dormant, I think I'm going to try taking the meloxicam again.
In other news...

On my way out, I stopped by the PT room to say hello to my therapist. He said he had recently done a music gig (he is a professional musician by night) at the university. Interestingly, I attended an evening event at the university tonight and chatted with one of the music professors about my therapist. The professor mentioned that AJ was one of just three 'professional level' bass players in town and was sort of a 'go to' guy for jazz musicians. He seemed surprised that a professional musician could have such a respectable day job, much in the same way that my students seem surprised when they realize that a lot of university faculty have talents outside their narrow fields of study. It's all rather amusing when you think about it.

Also at the function tonight, I spent some time with a colleague/friend who had the same surgery I did, but two months after I did. She is now about two months post-surgery and told me that she basically doesn't have any pain at all, except on rare occasions when 'I do something stupid.' She really felt there must be something wrong for me to be having so much pain four months later. Hmmmmm.

And finally, I turn 40 on Sunday. I have so many mixed feelings about that. I feel like my 30s brought so many great things to my life, but I've heard that the 40s can be even better. So here is to what is likely to be my last post here as a 39-year-old. Cheers!