February 29th, 2004
Well, the arm, it seems to be getting better. This morning when I woke up it didn’t hurt immediately like it usually does. It was about half an hour before it started aching. At that point I took three Advil and decided to avoid the taking of the Vicodin if possible. A bit later in the day I had to run some errands and knew the arm would be put under some testing, so I took a Vicodin before leaving.
I’ve been working for the past two hours straight and the arm is starting to tire, so I’ll take a half hour brake or so, then get back to it.
Also, let’s put a rest to the masterbation jokes. Since the arm started hurting I’ve heard either “That’s what happens when you jerk it too often” or “You should switch arms, spread out the activity” or something along those lines. I’ve now heard them all. I’m right handed, the arm that’s in the pain is the left.
February 29th, 2004
So a couple of weeks back I was out to dinner with Steve, Dorothy, Andy and some other folk. Andy’s got the Hollywood bachelor pad and lives the Hollywood bachelor lifestyle. Andy’s good people, a young L.A. hipster. We were all sitting at dinner and we all got to talking about cooking. I rarely cook. I used to know how, but apparently all my gotten knowledge has been forgotten. Andy said he was in the same exact boat, although it turns out his predicament was a bit worse. He then admitted the following.
“I just learned how to cook scrambled eggs this past week.”
I couldn’t fathom this. How can you be in your mid-twenties and not know how to cook scrambled eggs? I pointed out how it couldn’t have been that hard and asked if he just learned from trial and error. He said, no, he looked it up on the Internet.
This is the moment I learned the Internet was useful for more than just gathering up the latest German porn. With this link Andy was educated in the ways of scrambled egg preparation and, now, so are you.
February 26th, 2004
Praise Mel Gibson, the Vicodin seems to be working (actually I got the generic, Hydrocodone/APAP). I took the Vicodin at around 2:30 and it took an hour or so, but it kicked in and there was virtually no pain for about 3 1/2 hours. The only side effect is it amped me up a bit. Not sure if it’s the drugs that amped me up, or just the relief that I wasn’t in major amounts of pain anymore. Either way it allowed me to rest peacefully for a short bit and then to get some work done.
About 15 minutes ago the pain reemerged a little, so I took two Advil and will wait another 20 minutes or so before taking more Vicodin. I would like to take as little pain medication as possible, but I don’t want to wait until it gets out of hand again. Regardless, I’m back, baby! Now to finish some much needed work.
February 26th, 2004
Well, broke down and went to the doctor today. Actually, I went to an urgent care facility since I don’t have a primary doctor, nor do I have insurance. That’s going to change shortly.
The examination went pretty much exactly as I expected. The doc asked some questions, I told her how it came on and all the symptoms. She then said she wanted to get a full work up of x-rays. I mentioned that I’m paying this out of pocket and asked how much that would cost. At that moment she stopped and said, “Maybe we don’t need them.” That REALLY pissed me off. We hear so much about medicine these days and doctors ordering unnecessary tests and it appears I was witness to exactly that. She then did some physical tests, having me push and pull against her hand in various ways. There was no loss of strength and no difference between both arms. She then concluded that she believes it’s pain related to my back pain of a week ago, in other words it’s “referred pain.” She prescribed me Vicodin and said visit a doctor in a week if the pain persists.
Picked up my Vicodin and have taken two so far, one about half an hour after the first as their seemed to be no affect. It’s been about 15 minutes since the second one and while it’s not so painful I can’t type, there’s still pain in the upper arm, more centrally located towards the elbow.
I REALLY hope that the Vicodin helps because I’ve got loads and loads of work to catch up on. I’m going to go make a few calls, then take a nap.
Fucking crap ass arm.
February 26th, 2004
My arm is a fucker.
The pain continues in the left arm. It’s hard to explain, but most of the pain seems to be around the bend of the arm. Not in the elbow, but on the other side. The pain randomly moves up into the bicep and even the tricep. Generally when the muscle spasms happen it’s not painful, but soon after the spasms end it does and sometimes quite severely.
Earlier this evening I took three advil and that seemed to help some, but only for about an hour or two. Taking two advil did no good and the darvocet just made me loopy. My attention span plumetted down to maybe five seconds. I took one this afternoon and at 4:30 I just had to give up and take a nap. Three hours later I woke up, it was a nice nap, but almost immediately the pain was back.
I didn’t go to the doctor on Wednesday because my father and I agreed that more than likely the doctor would take a look at the arm for a few minutes, move it in five different directions (the pain doesn’t increase when it’s moved) and say here’s some pain killers, come back in a week if it still hurts. That’s pointless. But, if this continues into Thursday I’m just going to have to suck it up and go to the doctor in the hopes that they actually can do more than the above.
What this has done is make a hectic week even worse. I was already behind on a couple of projects, thankfully most of them aren’t majorly time sensitive, but this is making it worse. My plan tonight was to work until the wee hours, but it’s impossible as just typing this up seems to be exacerbating the pain.
Why am I telling you all this? Fuck if I know. It’s not some pathetic attempt for sympathy, not at all. I guess I was hoping that talking about it would magically make my arm better. Well, it hasn’t. Fucking arm. Lessee, if I just lop the sucker off with a steak knife at least one form of the pain will go away.
February 24th, 2004
Not sure what’s going on, but starting late last night my left arm has been hurting me. Not quite sure how I did it, either. All I can tell you is that the upper portion of my left arm has been twitching off an on somewhat frequently. It does it with such intensity that it actually ends up hurting after a while. I can’t tell if it’s because the muscles are being very overused (I don’t think this is the case) or something else. But after a while, the twitching becomes painfull. Then it goes away for a while.
I took some Advil earlier and it worked for about half an hour and it got painfull again. I took a Darvocet about an hour ago and all was fine for a while, but five minutes ago it started up again. In fact, typing right now is starting to hurt.
I REALLY hope this shit goes away and soon.
February 24th, 2004
If I end up going to London again this year, I’ll definitely stop by to check out this.
