Category: what it’s like

Fun week: rib injury rehab

Isy / / activity, basics, imp-possible, injuries & surgeries, perspective, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, what it's like

At the ER…

Packed out to the last couple chairs in the waiting room.

I fell in my garden and landed on a rib… T7 I think.

Insert Adam & Eve joke here.

I laid there in the sun for half an hour (with a friend on the phone with me). It didn’t help enough to let me breathe properly or be able to drive safely at all. My Dr’s nurse thought it best to come in for an x-ray.

Schrödinger’s injury:

Could be fairly trivial and my body is having a meltdown over it, or could be “thank goodness she hasn’t punctured a lung” time — but I’m betting on the former, because I just managed to get a deep enough breath to ease the air hunger. It’s only (😒) been 1:15 since I fell.

UPDATE:

Bent, not broken LOL This is particularly good news because these bones are problematic about fractures.

I get *one* good hit from the *one* narcotic available to me, and I’m on it now. Waiting for the lidocaine patch to kick in.

I’m about to eat something comforting & cash it in for a few days.

Recovery time is 2-6 weeks. Real specific. Fk that. Pain is life so let’s see how hard I can push respiration & recovery…

Tomorrow.

2nd UPDATE:

This is worth passing on: if you figure out how to get into the correct position, lying *on* the rib in question reassures the primitive brain that there’s nothing inserted into the thoracic cavity. All that soft sensation all around. The bodymap fills in with tactile reassurance.

I must be on the mend. Half a dozen ten- cent words in one sentence.

Anyway, the drama is over, and now I just buckle down to healing as fast & well as possible. Could be so much worse. Even when stupid stuff happens to me, I’m fortunate 🙏💖

3rd UPDATE:

As soon as I knew I wouldn’t have to deal with healing CRPSed bones, I told myself, in the ringing authoritarian tones I reserve for my own system, “we are going to heal from this as quickly and securely as possible.” I didn’t get any lip, so went with that assumption.

The trick is rehabbing without triggering windup or creating further injury.

Yesterday, as predicted, I worked on breathing. I think we’ve got nearly half the lung volume back, just gently working the margins and backing off when the painstarts to bite.

Today, as promised, I started stretching on the same policy. “Melt the ice, don’t break it” as my old sifu used to say. I could take my own zipped jacket off just now! Woo hoo!!

I hope to be able to drive short distances by day after tomorrow. I expect another week before being pretty close to baseline, but hey, it gives me something to do. (I’m on a deadline because I don’t want my body to think this is the new normal. Should be ok.)

I thought up a rollicking song this afternoon. It was pissy and testy as to the words, but very jolly as to the tune. I went to write it down, but fell asleep instead… A great loss to the world, I’m sure! 🤣🤣🤣

Rehabbing aaaall the ribs…

They’re ganging up on me 😂

They’ve splinted together nicely over the weekend, which I spent gently stretching and breathing.

Good news: I can reach forward and to the side! I can fill my lungs almost 90% of normal as long as there are pain meds on board!

Problematic nonsense:

Can’t hold anything while doing so, or it will snuggle up to gravity.

“Because eff you, that’s why”:

The individual intercostal connective tissues have banded together, glued by the intracellular garbage generated by the healing process, so the left side and left chest wall spasm as a unit when I move wrong or (gods forbid!) sneeze.

Sneezing is epic. I’m taking extra antihistamines cuz wow, let’s not do that again!

Plan:

Tomorrow, I will load up on antihistamines, Tylenol, and muscle relaxer, take the bus to my garden, and do 5 times more work than feels right and about 10 times more work than feels good. It’ll involve overriding the primal body signals about “this is causing damage” because the glued-down tissues are the damage.

I’m not sure this won’t provoke CRPS windup. I’ll call my magical physical therapist and see if she can get me in, because she can do at least as much good with a lot less risk.

Why TF…?

Because that’s the quickest and healthiest way to bust loose all this glue and get my left arm and left torso back into service.

I know this from bitter experience with my old sailing pal the physical medicine & rehab physician, Dr Carwile LeRoy , who got me to bust loose a tailbone injury years ago.

I had him to cuss out back then. This time, I’ll have no one but myself to shower bitter expletives on. Let’s see how much of a responsible grownup I can be about pushing myself hard enough. I’ve got scheduled downtime for a couple days afterwards.

I’ll watch Mulan tonight. That fires me up for physical endurance and exercise every time.

Windup, not in the athletic way

Isy / / basics, definitions & descriptions, injuries & surgeries, meds/drugs, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, slice of life, Toe, what it's like

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.

Central (brain & spine) windup, from inside

Isy / / activity, ANS and fight-or-flight, CRPS knock-on effects, injuries & surgeries, radical presence/radical acceptance, self-care, what it's like

People with pain windup, prepare to feel validated.

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 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.

Tetris.

While speaking over my shoulder, 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).  There was silence from the other room.

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 carrier oil that pushes stuff into the tissues).

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 signal of windup — where pain gets worse and more extensive after a blow, rather than easing off — go up my leg and through my hips, lighting up my piriformis, which has always been a bit of a diva. Spasms crept up my legs and flickered in my arms.

The active CRPS patches in my hands, wrists, and shins all pitched in, singing the song of their people.

I think of significant pains as having singing voices, and sometimes their singing drowns out other sounds. More often, it’s just a descant to whatever is going on; sometimes it’s a baseline running below everything else. Occasionally, it just shouts.

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. The fever-like prickling on my forehead and the comprehensive exhaustion are par for the course.

I just stubbed my foot. Nothing is broken. Were I healthy, I’d have saken it off in 10 minutes. This has trashed my day. This is a reality check, not an argument… this is what it’s like with longstanding CRPS.

This is the second or third “what it’s like” post, so I’ve made a new category for that. Not everyone wants to read it, and nor should they. Some people want to know exactly this, and this is for them.

I’ve put a lot of work into becoming more aware of my body because it’s easier to get leverage against faulty neurochemistry that way. Sadly, of course, dissociation happens for a reason and it gets hard to stay checked in — but I’m going to work on it.

Later.

I think today is for movies & grocery delivery rather than what I intended. I need a little constructive dissociation.

And that, ladies and gentlebeings, is windup, at least in me. It’s nuancedly different in everyone, but this is fairly standard — for this very nonstandard way of experiencing a normally trivial event.