Surviving the Cure

On the three week anniversary of my stupendous idiotic stunt, I had a massage scheduled. I first had it scheduled for last week, but due to other illnesses, I had to postpone what I knew was my last hope of feeling better.

Gil came in and I showed him my arm. My partially immobile arm. The one that couldn't straighten out or bend completely. I thought that the straightening out pain was muscular and the bending was neural, but even that may have been an error.

The first few days post-trauma, I used the sling constantly. Then my neck began to hurt so much that I switched to an intermittent usage of the sling, only when needed. Mostly I held my arm in a static position by muscles alone or by propping it with my good arm.

Therein lies a problem. After three weeks of tucking my arm in mostly a 90º angle, it didn't want to un-angle. The muscles themselves had begun to atrophy or contract. Or else, perhaps they were so cramped from a constant holding pattern they simply couldn't work any more.

Gil worked on my neck and arm and I can now almost completely straighten it out. I would say I am about 95% there, perhaps even more. If I let it hurt. Straightening out my arm is all muscle pain. There is nothing tingling and nothing shooting up or down my arm. Bending my arm, however, entails both muscular pain and the numbing, shooting stuff I associate with nerve involvement.

So my plan is to allow the muscular pain to just happen. My arm needs to move through the pain in order to get back my full range of motion. I'm willing to live with constant low grade pain for a couple days in order to get my arm back long term. I'm a little more worried about the nerve stuff.

Pain is nature's way of telling us to stop doing that, whatever that is. The muscular pain is simply from misuse. The nerve pain is from a damaged nerve, something I don't wish to further damage. I'm willing to go through the stretching, cramping, tearing stuff for the muscles, but nerves aren't supposed to do that. But if I continue to not bend my arm up, the muscles are only going to get worse.

So, I took a walk around the block with my arm down at my side with the hefty weight of the dog's leash further exercising the muscles. Pitiful, but there it is. I'm willing to keep bending my arm until I get any of that buzzing stuff going on. Then, I stop. I don't wish to exacerbate any swelling and compression around the nerve itself.

This is the best I can figure out to do right now. I hope that in the next three weeks I will get myself completely healed. I won't be nearly as useful for moving across the country as a crippled old lady. I better get that fixed prior to my departure. I'm working on it.

I have another massage scheduled for next week and that will hopefully loosen up any more muscle contractures that I've not been able to loosen up on my own.

With all this sitting around and doing nothing, I'm frightened to step back on the scale. If I was too fat before all this happened, I can only surmise it is worse now.

On a happier note, I bought three more pairs of stretch pants.