Pain in the...
I was going to write about our holiday (it was brilliant!! Very relaxing, with enough things to do to keep us busy, but not too much, as we just wanted to chill out.)
But instead, I'm just going to talk about pain.
Anyone who's been loitering around this blog for a while knows I'd got a dodgy back. I've lost a disc in my lower back, and just to make life more fun, I'm hypermobile. So this causes...problems.
Happily, I have a very high pain threshold. (I never know how people work that out. I mean, who knows what pain feels like to anyone, let alone then judge how much one person feels pain vs. another person? Anyway, that's what I've been told by various medical professionals, so I suppose I believe it.) Unhappily, having a very high pain threshold means I damage myself more than some other people, and don't take medication in time to prevent further damage.
So...right now I've downed two co-codamol 30/500. (That's...Tylenol 3, in the USA, I think, except ours has a higher level of paracetamol in the mix than yours). Earlier I took co-co and Naproxin.
All this has done so far is make my jaw and shoulders tense up a lot. It hasn't touched the pain in my leg.
This means I started Googling stuff. Because what else does anyone feeling a bit rough do in this day and age? And I found out that hypermobility can be linked closely to Fibromyalgia. I've always wondered where my HM came from - as no one else in my family is mobile at all, really! In fact my Dad is positively...immobile. But that's in part because he has fibromyalgia. So, perhaps we're linked afterall! Just...experiencing quite different ends to the conditions. Fascinating.
Anyway, I know quite a few of you out there also live with chronic pain for various reasons, and I just wanted to say...well, hey. Whilst none of us can do anything to physically help each other, sometimes it just helps to know that other people know just how tough it is to drag yourself out of bed every day and go to work and get back and try to have a social life and all that and still keep smiling when every single thing you do is dogged with pain and fatigue and everything that comes with a life of drug taking. Well done to us for managing as well as we do :) don't think people can possibly understand what it's like until they've done it.
After all that, have a picture of my number one thing I did on my holiday...
That is the Falkirk Wheel. I am a massive geek about large good-looking engineering projects.
It lifts canal boats from the pool you see, to the canal at the top as it spins. It's 35metres tall. It can carry a combined weight of 600 tonnes.
And to move all that...it takes the same amount of energy as it would do to boil 8 kettles. AMAZING.
But instead, I'm just going to talk about pain.
Anyone who's been loitering around this blog for a while knows I'd got a dodgy back. I've lost a disc in my lower back, and just to make life more fun, I'm hypermobile. So this causes...problems.
Happily, I have a very high pain threshold. (I never know how people work that out. I mean, who knows what pain feels like to anyone, let alone then judge how much one person feels pain vs. another person? Anyway, that's what I've been told by various medical professionals, so I suppose I believe it.) Unhappily, having a very high pain threshold means I damage myself more than some other people, and don't take medication in time to prevent further damage.
So...right now I've downed two co-codamol 30/500. (That's...Tylenol 3, in the USA, I think, except ours has a higher level of paracetamol in the mix than yours). Earlier I took co-co and Naproxin.
All this has done so far is make my jaw and shoulders tense up a lot. It hasn't touched the pain in my leg.
This means I started Googling stuff. Because what else does anyone feeling a bit rough do in this day and age? And I found out that hypermobility can be linked closely to Fibromyalgia. I've always wondered where my HM came from - as no one else in my family is mobile at all, really! In fact my Dad is positively...immobile. But that's in part because he has fibromyalgia. So, perhaps we're linked afterall! Just...experiencing quite different ends to the conditions. Fascinating.
Anyway, I know quite a few of you out there also live with chronic pain for various reasons, and I just wanted to say...well, hey. Whilst none of us can do anything to physically help each other, sometimes it just helps to know that other people know just how tough it is to drag yourself out of bed every day and go to work and get back and try to have a social life and all that and still keep smiling when every single thing you do is dogged with pain and fatigue and everything that comes with a life of drug taking. Well done to us for managing as well as we do :) don't think people can possibly understand what it's like until they've done it.
After all that, have a picture of my number one thing I did on my holiday...
That is the Falkirk Wheel. I am a massive geek about large good-looking engineering projects.
It lifts canal boats from the pool you see, to the canal at the top as it spins. It's 35metres tall. It can carry a combined weight of 600 tonnes.
And to move all that...it takes the same amount of energy as it would do to boil 8 kettles. AMAZING.