Category: Head

Not recommended – a poem

Isy / / communication tools, CRPS knock-on effects, Head, imp-possible, martial & internal arts, meds/drugs, philosophy, poetry, radical presence/radical acceptance, realpolitik

Tap here for the audio version.

This one is probably just for fellow painees. Others are welcome, but be aware it might be hard going.

How I got to now

Sunday: 2 hours of unexpected VOC exposure.

Monday: massive (for me) radiation exposure, over 1 h.

Tuesday (today): trigger point injections, 3rd or 4th I’ve had. Each is more painful than the last. This one was epic, and there’s nothing I can do about it cuz mast cell dysfunction and cytochrome (genetic) variants mean that pain meds give me all of the side effects and none of the benefits.

This isn’t about whining. It’s about naming a very bad day. Then, one breath or minute or hour at a time, moving on.

This poem fell out of my keyboard today in a comment on socials:

High on pain. Not recommended. 

Of all the highs that touch the skies,
Most humans choose from chemical vibes:
From mickey to fin, from plants to sin,
Delight is the evanescing disguise

That covers the deep unknowable scars
We tend to bear, when off to the stars
We go, and throw our pain in the bin
For respite or maybe transcendence– too wise
To hope for remission, that damnable prize
Of luckier chemistry, luckier lives;

Decades in,
Pain is untreatable, sometimes unbeatable,
And all I can do is rise… and rise…
And not give in.

 

Copyright me, 2026, the year Hell opened its maw for us all.

P. S. ~25 years in, I’ve tried everything and some days are like that. Heigh ho. Moving along…

Where to start? Head to toe

Isy / / basics, care team, definitions & descriptions, Head, Head to toe

I’m going to give organizing my mental database a try here. The aim is to pick one broad topic each month and cycle through them in a year. I’m doing it the way nurses and doctors are taught to do it: head to toe.

Physical assessments have to go from head to toe, every time, without exception. This makes use of the brain’s basic tendency to work in patterns. If you assess every patient from head to toe, every time, then the variances are easier to find (because your brain is so dialed into what to expect at that point in the pattern) and it’s a lot easier to get to a sound differential diagnosis.

If I go to the doctor with a sore knee, the doctor is still going to notice my level of consciousness, attachment to or detachment from my environment, track my gaze and whether the sides of my face are more or less equal, differentiate how much of my limp is because my knee hurts and whether any of it is because my balance is off (all of that is about the brain), notice my breathing pattern (lungs), become aware of blood- flow problems (heart) showing up in my skin, and checking to see if I’m “splinting” or bracing against pain or weakness in my abdomen (g.i/g.u. systems) and hips (ortho, right above the knee).

An experienced doctor does most of this in 1 to 3 seconds, because it’s a head- to- toe assessment every single time and they can just let their pattern-matching brain (which is powerful and primal) take care of it and send up a flag to their conscious mind if anything is abnormal.

The medical term for “head to toe” is “cephalocaudal”, which literally means “head to tail”… but humans don’t have much in the way of tails, and our bodies keep going for quite a ways after them. I’d love to hear from my Latin-knowledgeable readers what the term should be!

I’m recovering from a migraine, which is very on-topic, but I’m not yet up to writing much. I thought I’d introduce this new structure, which I hope will be a bit simpler and less overwhelming than “what am I wrestling with right now that I could usefully write about?” There’s so much to write about, it magnifies the intransigence of the empty page. (Writers know what that’s like.)

A head.