I forgot that I posted an earlier version of this piece. At the time, I didn’t know how long it would take to recover.
It’s ok, though; nobody has read the earlier version yet. 🤣
My life is Tetris. Logistically, medically, attentionally, and furniturely — it’s all Tetris.
Keep an eye on the last word in that series.
There’s a tall metal piece of furniture that’s supremely helpful for drying sheets on, and if you lower it to earth it becomes a water-resist Sunny Obsidian Surge rowing machine.
Excellent piece.
I recently put colorful tape on the bottom end because it had to be moved 2 inches out from its old position and I knew the color would register out of the corner of my eye (my brain responds well to color).
Tetris.
While speaking over my shoulder — which made my peripheral vision irrelevant — I slammed my foot into it.
Despite having 2 people to mask for, I didn’t mask so much as lean over so they couldn’t see my face. I pounded the doorframe a bit (this rower is right by a door).
So much for the immediate reaction. I hobbled to my bedside where all my gear is. I slathered it with magnesium oil (magnesium blocks a chunk of pain transmission) and then, when I could touch it, emu oil (which is a pain-reducing carrier oil that pushes stuff into the tissues).
This was great because, bit by bit, it went from near-blackout pain to simply, y’know, a throbbing nightmare that slowly began to take shape and allow me to work out what to do.*
I put sturdy shoes on, not because it felt great but because my feet needed to feel protected.
I swung my foot up onto a couple of pillows on the couch. Felt the shimmering windup go up my leg and through my hips, lighting up my piriformis, which has always been a bit of a diva. The active CRPS patches in my hands, wrists, and shins all pitched in, singing the song of their people.
I think of pains as having voices, and sometimes their singing drowns out other sounds. Sometimes it’s just a descant to whatever is going on. Sometimes it’s a baseline running below everything else.
Occasionally, the pain just screams.
And now the muscle failure is creeping in, so I have to put down my phone and just listen to something loud enough to drown out this chorus.
All things pass, and, eventually, so did this.
The magic trick
I’ve been practicing resting when I’m tired. I’m 60 now and it has taken up to this year for me to have any real peace with it. Good thing, too, because it allowed me to spend enough time in bed, diligently and gently, for my nervous and endocrine systems to stand down again.
It only took a couple of weeks.
* “What to do” differs for each of us. I can’t take pain meds except Tylenol, which typically gives me about 5-10% relief and sometimes that’s enough to let me cope. NSAIDS trigger a body-wide mast cell reaction which makes everything hurt in a whole new key. Demerol makes me violently psychotic. Other narcotics paralyze my gut and, annoyingly, don’t help my pain. Same goes for weed. Ice makes everything worse with my pain, for tiresome CRPS-malfunction reasons.
So, most of my pain management is what one friend describes as “off-road”, because the health care system doesn’t provide it and hasn’t studied it much. It’s all from my understanding of the physiochemistry of pain transmission, studying the ways CRPS changes that game and working out how to push back, decades of networking and sharing tips with fellow painees, and believing my repeated, reliable, consistent results over my own assumptions.
I hope that this blog provides useful tips to others stuck in similar situations. A lot of us bloggers think about how we can be the resource that we needed when we were newer to this.