Tuesday, August 24, 2004
Ouch
I took out a bag of rubbish Monday, and managed to trip over an old bumper that has been adjacent to the rubbish barrels for months. As far as I know, it’s the doing of Slacker Dude upstairs that it is camped there, but it could be the landlord left it for some reason. You’d think I’d have missed it like all the other times, since it’s such a fixture.
It was probably funny to watch, and was spectacular enough for a lady across the street to call out asking was I okay. I managed to move the bumper a significant distance while tripping and toppling forward onto the pavement. In my anger when I picked myself up, I grabbed and tossed the bumper several feet into the brush at the side of the driveway. No need to keep the danger in place.
I took a small gouge out of my right thumb, scraped, bruised, and in whatever other “swell” ways injured my right knee, injured my right arm, to a lesser degree having more to do with making existing problems flare up, injured my left arm, and apparently my left knee and back aren’t too happy. Yay. I used ice on my knee for an hour or so. Eventually things seemed to settle out a bit. At first I could only type with my left hand, which makes things interesting and limited any keyboard usage. Then mousing became difficult with my right.
I could only sit so long before ending up on my back in bed part of the day letting things settle down. The knee became less swollen after a while, and eventually stopped feeling like parts were clicking in a distrubing way when I bent it.
Everything really settled down, then the knee started hurting again as I watched the Olympics. Now the back and right knee hurt intensely, right arm and hand almost as much so, and the left arm and knee think they are being left out. Time for ibuprofen, bed, and hope this is fine tomorrow and was as “no big deal” self-treatable as I thought.
Update:
Seems much better after a night of sleep. Hope it stays that way.
Monday, May 10, 2004
Ouch
After a totally restless night of sleep, I woke up with a killer sore throat. Makes me wonder if the sleep thing was on account of coming down with something.
Maybe coffee will help.
Meanwhile, it’s not a time to be sick, considering I was expecting to have to post a “blogging from me may be light this week” notice here, I expect to be so flat out busy. Sheesh.
Saturday, April 10, 2004
Ouch
One more thing I hope the positive air pressure machine for sleep apnea can do for me: eliminate grinding and gnashing of teeth at night.
I don’t always, but during an extraordinarily restless night of thrashing and waking up panting last night, I did enough damage to have made eating painful all day. There’s one lower right molar that bears the brunt and pays me back for whatever it is I do to it in my sleep. The bite has been checked and adjusted so it should not be especially prone to this. I had a mouth guard made, but I can’t wear it for more than a couple minutes without triggering my hyperactive gag reflex. In fact, it had been so long since this happened, I’d forgotten about it, and the possibility it might be connected.
As for the sleep machine, I called the medical supply place, asked for Dave, and found he wasn’t there. Then I found out there was no record I existed, except possibly on Dave’s person. Dave didn’t call me back, despite having both home and cell numbers. Guess it’s not quite as much of an incentive to deal with me, now that I have the expensive part and only need to spend about $125. Which the phone answering woman to whom I was a mystery thought would be more like $200 before I recited the number Dave had told me. She also told me they could come to my house or I could go there. I expressed a preference for the latter.
And I still have not gotten official results on paper from the sleep lab yet! After I wrote a check to the doctor who billed me for the interpretation or whatever, I decided I shouldn’t even think about mailing it until after I see some concrete result besides people wanting to sell me hardware.
Perhaps if I get the machine going and sleep better, I won’t get all tense and mess up my teeth. That would be nice.