What did I say last time about bad things happening in October…? I wasn’t wrong; it’s done it again, I’m sorry to say…
My back had just healed and I had enlisted some muscle to help me move my big pieces of furniture to lay out a beautiful piece of carpet that covers my entire living room (which I got cheap at a bargain outlet). I was planning on moving lightweight items as my back had just recovered and, wouldn’t you know, the first thing I pick up (which weighed all of 2 pounds) and my sacroiliac joint went pow… It’s happened a few other times, but this was different somehow. So I popped a naproxen so I could still function and kept going. Poor Anakin… He’s known me all my life and he could tell I was hurting so bad. And by 6:30, I was in tears and got a ride to the hospital’s emergi-care where some guy who just wanted to go home gave me a shot for pain (which did nothing) and a script for muscle relaxers.
What a fun week it was… I literally piled up pillows to put myself in homemade traction. Muscle relaxers, low dose steroids, Vicodin, Tramadol, lidocaine patches… Nothing helped. The heating pad helped a little, but not enough. I knew something wasn’t kosher when narcotic pain killers didn’t do shit to kill the pain. On the 5th day after the incident, I called my family doctor because the pain was no longer shooting down the back of my leg, it was moving into my hip. I was desperate. She suggested I call an orthopedic which is also when she prescribed the Tramadol to see if it would help until I got in to see one. So I called the local hospital and told them I didn’t care how far away I had to travel, I had to see one the next day because I couldn’t deal any longer.
I was in luck; I got an appointment at the orthopedic office at the hospital. Of course I had to get a ride there… The pain in my hip was so bad I had to walk with a cane…
So after a series of incredibly painful X-rays (stand sideways and bend forward and backward, because that almost works) the doctor I saw told me from how my vertebrae were aligned, he could tell my whole back was in spasm. News to me since I only felt pain in that little joint area which was the size of the tip of my index finger. Literally, that’s all the bigger the pain area was, but it ran so deep… He also told me I had mild scoliosis, which I kind of knew. I’ve had a slight curvature to my spine they found when I was in my late 20s. Last time I had X-rays, it was a slight scoliosis. Now it’s mild. I could see it looked worse, which I found a bit upsetting. No one wants to think about their spine just turning into more and more of a question mark when you look at it from the back. Then he dropped the bomb… I have degenerative arthritis in the lower lumbar vertebrae… I asked him what that meant and he didn’t seem too concerned as he said it takes years to develop and years to only make perhaps a millimeter of difference. Still, from now on, this will keep happening (I assume with more frequency the older I get) and I have to be cautious when I’m doing things because you don’t know when it’ll get set off and what will do it. So his instructions were to lay around all weekend and do nothing except relax on the heating pad, take muscle relaxers and higher dose steroids and I’d feel better in three to five days. And I need physical therapy…
I actually cried at some point… It’s so difficult sometimes. I’ve had bad knees since I was 19 which have gotten worse over all these years. And everything has gotten worse since I went through surgical menopause. It’s funny… I used to hate running laps in high school and now I would give anything to be able to run. Or even walk without pain. My mind and my spirit feel 16 on a good day; it wants to run, to dance like I used to when I went clubbing (even if it’s just in my house), to exercise, to be able to clean my house properly. But as soon as I want to do these things, my body constantly reminds me that my mind and spirit may feel 16, but it feels about 116… It’s frustrating. Other people my age have aches and pains, sure. But not like this. And it fucking sucks…
So fun times for me over the weekend… I literally laid around like a lump and watched movies on the Fire Stick… Since Halloween was coming, I Googled a list of horror/thriller movies and watched all the ones that sounded pretty good. Surprisingly, I did find a shit ton of awesome movies I never saw before or ones I thought looked stupid in previews (Fantasy Island was better than my biased mind expected; I just couldn’t see it without Ricardo Montalbán). And, since I do like M. Night Shyamalan movies with their bizarre plot twists, I decided to watch this movie called Old… Probably not the best choice of movies when I’m feeling incredibly old… Oddly enough, I think it made me feel better I think. The characters in the movie go to a beautiful resort and a select handful are told about this beautiful secret beach. Only certain guests are told and taken there and it doesn’t take long for them to find out why. There’s something about the beach, perhaps something about the magnetism in the rock walls surrounding it, that cause time to move faster and speed up the aging process. Worse, they can’t leave… When they do, they end up blacking out. So these poor people literally age 50 years in a day, which really sucks for the kids. They didn’t even get to grow up properly. I guess it made me see I shouldn’t complain.
But on the upside, I have had other things to keep me occupied in my laid up state…
I hadn’t played my Animal Crossing New Horizons game in several months because it had gotten a bit boring, to be honest. My island was how I wanted it to look (for the most part), I had all the villagers I loved best and I’d already been there and done that since I’d been playing it for over a year. But then I found out there was going to be a huge update coming. And when I say huge, I mean crazy ass huge! This is the last major update and it’s so big it’s unfathomable! They’re adding so much new content, new things you can do… Honestly, I was so excited for all the things you can do with this new update that my creative mind went into overdrive! It gets released November 5th, so I decided that I better start playing again to get back in the groove and start saving up money for all the new furniture items and other interesting things.
And as soon as I started playing again, I realized I had a major issue… They added so much more stuff that I’m literally going to have to terraform my entire island… again… Do you have any idea how many hours, how much thought and in-game currency I’ve spent to make my island look exactly how I wanted it to look?! Do you have any idea the blood, sweat and tears that went into all this?! Now I’m getting bombarded with all this new stuff and I’m literally losing my mind because all I can think of is where in the happy ass fuck am I going to make room to farm more vegetables other than fucking pumpkins?! And gyroids are returning, but they come in broken pieces you have to bury, water and dig up the following day. Where am I going to have room for that?!?
Not to mention the fact that the amount of currency I have in the bank, while ridiculous (I wish my real bank account looked like that), isn’t going to be good enough. It costs to tear down staircases and bridges, build new ones (which are crazy expensive), move homes (also crazy expensive) and now the characters that would visit your island will have their own area on a separate island (that’s been there from the beginning) but guess who has to fund their little trailers so they can open up shop? You guessed it; I do… I’m so not prepared for any of this shit, I’m really not. I wish Nintendo would have told us this months ago so we could have started saving then already. Or, better yet, make things not cost so much in game that we need to save an insane amount just to do what we’d like to do to make our islands look like paradise.
In the meantime, I’ll leave myself with this message…
Well… what else can I do, right? I’ll muddle through all this shit and eventually my back will chill the fuck out and I’ll be me again. I hope… At least until the next time I’m doing nothing strenuous and it just decides to have a massive moment on me.
At this point, however, I’d really appreciate it if you guys could send some positive, healing vibes. I’m seriously bored out of my fucking skull just sitting here in traction, doped up on muscle relaxers and pain killers and watching television. And sleeping… That shit makes me do a lot of sleeping. Just send them all care of this blog.
My back will thank you for it!
and She Said... 