State of the Empire – 10/14/18

It’s been a tough month since the last State of the Empire was penned on 9/16/18. Immediately following WordCamp L.A. (a WordPress developers & admins conference), my back problems forced me to seek out a new chiropractor while my newest one was down with some horrible, internal parasite (see what eating healthy gets you???). I took a chance on the chiro in my newest business networking group and thank the Goddess I did! Concerned on my initial visit by a hunch he had about my condition, he sent me the following week for x-rays, which I got done and brought back to him. They discovered something rather unpleasant I was not prepared for.

I have Osteoarthritis.

If it sounds loathsome and/or lethal, well the good news is it’s not fatal, but arthritis is never fun and the “osteo” part means it’s in my back. There were many places on the x-rays where calcification outlined bone everywhere and in one area in my lower back, two vertebrae were starting to fuse together. Pointing to several discs inbetween the spine’s vertebrae, it was obvious to even me that several were shrunken to half the size they should be, with one nearly gone. I shivered to think what kind of agony I’dve been in if it had been ground down to nothing and that pain had hit me one day without warning.

Luckily, oh so luckily, he said we had caught it in time and that the damage could be reversed. That shocked me. I didn’t know that discs could be regrown, but indeed, he looked at me, shrugged and said, “Why not?”

Because of the damage and the need to fix my postural problems as well, I’ve been going to him weekly and it has been no picnic. Every next day after an  adjustment has brought on intense pain the likes of which I have never in my life experienced in my feet, especially the already slightly deformed right one. Reversing literal decades of wear and tear and damage has been brutally painful, keeping my computer time limited and me often down on my back with near-prescription levels of Ibuprofen and ice packs on my bad right foot. Just tonight, after walking a bit too far, I had to take a two-hour nap while waiting for the painkillers to work and luckily, after only low-levels of discomfort, I’ve been at the computer two hours with very little pain.

It has been a tough month struggling with pain that has made me sob while trying to walk to the bathroom in the middle of the night and morning and trying to reclaim the sense of normalcy I used to have before this. Even then it was starting to crumble before more and more frequently ineffective office visits suffered the past year, and if I hadn’t done something this drastic to find out what was wrong and correct it, the downward spiral would have continued until I would have ended up disabled. Not much choice there, but I knew then and still believe that suffering through rehabing my condition now is infinitely more preferable than the alternative fate old age had originally planned for me.

So, to end this blog on a positive note, the pain is getting better, though it is still intense. I couldn’t walk when I first started these treatments and now I can and to me, more importantly, I can now sit down and begin writing full chapters in one sitting. That to me is worth all the pain suffered through in the world.

Until next week.

Nyx