So the back is getting a bit better

I went to the doc last Thursday morning for what was supposed to be an MRI, but after a clinical exam the back was showing some improvement (I didn't collapse this time when I got on my tippy toes lol) so he figured no MRI was necessary. He wants to see me again in 3 weeks, if improvement is continuing then fine, otherwise he wants to explore an epidural. Hell no to that, but I didn't bother bringing it up since I am determined my back will still be improving in 3 weeks. I'm not real big on needles, let alone needles stuck into my spine.

He said what we want to see is the swelling to go down so the white blood cells can get into the stuff thats herniated from the center of the disc(s) and basically suck the juice out of it, shrivel it like a raisin, which in turn will allow it to quit pressing against the nerves and in short heal me. So thats what we want. So basically good news on that front.

Not so good news with my ex wife though. She's still bound and determined, for reasons unknown, to be an evil bitch. Quick backstory: she left me. She left me for someone else, got married 6 weeks after our divorce was final. You would think she wouldn't be such a bitch and yet she is 12 years later. Yes, I said 12 years. The way she acts you would think its been 12 minutes.

2 weekends ago she brought my son up to visit me (I pick him up on my weekends, its a 7 hour round trip) and I paid her $40 for gas. She told me then she couldn't do that every weekend, maybe once or twice a month. Thats fine for the time being. But now she's refusing to do it anymore. According to our mediation agreement from 2000 (mediation that was necessary because of her exploiting every bit of gray area in the original custody agreement) I get makeup weekends when there is sickness involved in missing weekends. This counts as an illness, my being unable to drive. She is outright refusing to give me those makeup weekends. When I tell her I will take her to court, she mocks me and asks me how, since I don't have the money to do that. Fortunately she does this in emails, so I have written proof of her being a piece of shit.

So in short here, I have absolutely no idea when I'll be able to see my son again. I cannot make the drive right now. To keep my back from hurting I have to stay on the meds, and while I will drive to work and so forth on them...I am not undertaking a 7 hour excursion while medded up, half of that with my son in the car. Far too dangerous. The alternative that was brought up was him taking a train from Champaign to Homewood. I can't quite make that long of a drive yet, to Homewood from Woodridge, but I think the way things are improving I can do it soon. Only problem is now she's saying she won't drive him to Champaign to get on the train. From Danville to Champaign is half as long a drive as it is from Woodridge to Hometown.

Anyway, she's a piece of shit. If any 2o2p folk out there are family court lawyers that are willing to work cheap, please PM me.

Things just got a little better....

I mentioned my exwife wasn't going to help me out as far as transportation for my son goes.  As mentioned before, I have to travel 7 hours to pick him up because she moved downstate with him.  I've been making that trip 3 times a month for the last 12 years.  I drive down to get him, she comes and picks him up.  Well, with this back problem its been hard for me to drive the 10 minutes or so to work every morning, there's no way I can make it to get him...especially now with the meds I'm on.

So I asked her last weekend if she could drive him up here because my back was messed up.  I offered her in exchange either to pay $40 for her gas or to make up the drive (me do both ends on a future weekend) once my back clears up.  In the past she has called me literally hours or less before she was supposed to be here to pick him up, crying about not feeling good, migraines, whatever, and asking me to drive or at least meet her halfway or more.  I've pretty much always done it...I mean, what choice do I have?  It was usually doing the school year and he had to be at school the next day....can't screw with his school attendance.

So I ask her if she can help me out, and of course....no.  She has a bunch of excuses why.  There have been times in the past I've asked her for similar help, and occasionally she has done it but other times she makes an excuse.  Most of those times my son would tell me later that she was lying...he'd even called her on it a few times, and she told him she just didn't feel like driving so she made it up.  Nice.

So like I said, last week she said no so we arranged a switch of weekends from last weekend to this weekend now, which was her weekend,  Now obviously with the way things have developed between last weekend and now I've gone from "my back is hurting and I can't drive 7 hours" to "I have a herniated disc and I can't drive 7 hours".  After my visit to the ER Wednesday I emailed her and told her I had just been to the ER, had to go by ambulance, my back is REALLY messed up...PLEASE can you help me out here.  Its already been a couple weeks since I've seen my son, please help me out.  And her answer?  No.

So I unloaded on her in an email.  Nothing profane of course, but I just laid it out...reminded her of all the last minute phone calls I'd gotten from her over the years, and how she really needs to understand that if she's going to stiff me here then she can forget about any future help.  In short, don't bother picking up a phone next time you need help.

So after I got back from the doctor yesterday and found out my L5 was herniated (ever notice I start paragraphs with "So" a lot?  I gotta work on that) I emailed her just fyi, that disc problem I developed back when we were married has escalated to a herniated disc, so I don't know how long its going to be before I can make that drive again.  To my surprise, out of the blue late last night I got an email from her that she would bring him up and wanted the money for gas (I offered her the choice remember). 

Well, at least thats good.  Its great, actually.  So this weekend won't be so depressing, it should be quite wonderful since I'll have my visitation with my son.  So things are getting better, and thats a positive.

Update

So I just got back a bit ago from seeing a spinal specialist.  He wanted to do an MRI but I begged off, mainly because my insurance acts stupid sometimes and I can't afford an MRI if they decide not to pay for it.  They should, but you guys know how those crooks at insurance companies operate.

So through a clinical exam the doc decides I have a herniated disc.  In fact, he was dead sure of it.  It wasn't "I think" or "maybe", it was "well, your L5 is herniated".

Hooray.

At least that explains the pain, right?  So surgery is out (for several reasons), all I can do is try to keep up the anti-inflammatory meds and the pain killers.  He gave me a new script for oxycontin 20mg, told me not to fuck around and take it more than twice a day or it could kill me.  He also told me that if its still hurting in 2 weeks I'm getting an MRI whether I want one or not.  I went ahead and scheduled the appt...figured I might as well, right?  He also gave me a different stretch exercise to do.  Apparently the ones I had been doing were actually the last thing I wanted to be doing with this type of injury.  That kinda made me chuckle...I mean, of course that would turn out to be the case.

So anyway, thats whats going on now.  I do want to say that I really appreciate all the well wishes and prayers I've been getting from you folks.  You're the best.

And it just keeps getting better...

Here's a followup to my last blog about my jacked up back...

Today I got to, for the first time ever in my life, ride in an ambulance! Why? Because my back was so fucked up this morning that I was sobbing like a little bitch with tears streaming down my face and had to crawl on my belly to my neighbor's apartment and ask him to call 911 for me.

Pain

Yeah, pain.  John Cougar was full of shit when he claimed it "Hurt So Good".

(yeah I know what the song is about, just saying is all)

About 2 weeks before the LAN last month my ankle started hurting, and within the week it was swollen to about half the size of my head (I only wish I was exagerating) and I wound up in the ER on a Friday night getting treated for what the attending described as gouty arthritis,  That cleared up, and about 2 weeks ago my back tightened up like I had funny or something.

Now, you know when you get an ache or a pain (especially if its something you've had before), and you dismiss it as something that will go away on its own soon enough?  I do that too.  Only problem is any more its not going away, it just gets worse to the point its deabilitating.  Like this back tweak.

Its gotten to the point where not only does the back hurt on the right side, my entire right side of my ass hurts and it runs down to my knee, focusing on the top of my calf and running down to my ankle.  And I mean fuck, it hurts bad.  Its why I've hardly been posting the last couple weeks, why I haven't been on Live much.  I had to cancel this weekend's visitation with my son because I can barely handle driving for 10 minutes to get to work, let alone the 7 hour round trip to pick my boy up.  I feel like a jackass at work because a month ago I was on crutches with my ankle, and now I'm hobbled with the back.  My boss was trying to get me to take a few days off and I wouldn't.  I can still get the job done and we have new people that need to be trained, so I'm not missing.  Plus I'm still working towards my goal of 1 year + with no call-offs, which I will make at the end of October.

Anyway, back to the point.  If there is a point, I mean this is kind of rambling and I don't even know why I'm blogging about it.  Its kind of hard dealing with this because not only is it hard to be practically immobile while you live alone, but the pain from my gout incident drove me to the brink of what I can handle and this is pushing me over it.  I have a high threshhold for pain, very high.  Between 3 shoulder and 2 knee surgeries, an already messed up back (bulging/degenerative L5), and about half a dozen sublexed ribs I am always hurting to some degree.

So this weekend I've pretty much spent in bed.  Oh, one thing I figured was that my shoes were old and kind of broken up (which they were) so I figured I was not only not getting good support from them, but it was probably causing or exasperating the problem.  So I went out and got new shoes this morning (payday last Friday ftw!) and stopped off at the EB over there and chatted with the manager.  He's a big dude too, and it turns out he had exactly the same type of problem about a month ago.  It was kind of funny because he was mentioning all the symptoms, and how if you did this or that it sometimes felt better, but if you did something else it made it worse...exactly the same as with me  He thought he had blown a disc, and with his wife being a nurse she took him to the hospital she worked at and had him x-rayed.  No disc problems.  So he went and saw a doc, turns out it was what was described as a "long-term back spasm".  So he told me about these stretches the doc had him do and how Icy-Hot helped him.  So I've been doing those stretches, and they do help, but it makes the muscles hurt even worse a bit later since they're being used like that.

So I've spent today in bed, stretching, sleeping, and rubbing icy-hot on my ass.  Beat that, all you single guys!

Its amazing how much everything has gone to shit from a health perspective since I turned 40 in June.