I have shirked all responsibilities the last two work days and now I'll probably be ducking out on weekend responsibilities too. I've got four concurrent problems going on, ordered by when they showed up:
Tingly leg - Leg tingles in the morning. This stops about noon. This is standard issue MS stuff, predates any other problems, and frankly, expected after the stress in late October. Or, it could be a pinched nerve.
Dizziness - This is also par for the MS course. BPPV, with the V for vertigo and one of the Ps for positional. Everything starts to spin, I move my head, spinning stops.
Sore Jaw - Still sore after the cavity / crown. They did call to tell me my permanent crown was in a week early, and I laughed at the thought of hobbling in for more dental work.
Sprained Back - This is the worst. I feel like garbage with this back problem. More precisely, I smell like garbage. Not like pee, which you would expect after the back problem. (Not that the back problem affects my bladder, but it does affect the speed at which I can make it to the bathroom.) No, I smell like fear, or stress, just an acrid odor. Perhaps that's a result of all the Tylenol I've been taking.
The weirdest thing, and the reason I am tallying them, is that if one recedes another one intensifies. I suppose this is just a perception thing. Or maybe person has only so many pain receptors. But then, that doesn't align, because two of those things aren't pain related. But truly, if I calm my back pain my left leg tingles like mad that day. I randomly have either jaw pain or back pain at any one time. If I have neither it's great only the room spins every fifteen minutes.
I keep looking for connections. It all seems to happen on the left side! It could all be TMJ and stress! This is just me trying to make sense out of this aging nonsense, I'm sure. You know what would be great? If there was a covid variant with these four symptoms.
The good thing is that I have paid sick leave and a comfy firm chair and access to a number of streaming services. Prepare for a week of entertainment reviews.
Q: do you have a massage wand or something? Because a specialized PT taught me that yes, actually, we can confuse our nerves, so if you have an area that is in pain but shouldn't be (is not mechanically damaged; the pain is not a warning signal you should be paying attention to, but something that needs to be un-Pavlov-ed), you can use vibration on it or "upstream" of it.
So: hand in a bowl of marbles, vibration, hairbrush bristles against skin: do any of those make any of the symptoms recede a bit?
(I have *definitely* had pain that was middling and that I didn't notice at all while there was a Big Honking Pain Source, and then once that went away, oh, yes, there is this other pain, and this stuff works with that, but you've got more... variety... going on there.)(Stress/grief does weird things, too, so there is that.)
Posted by: KC | January 21, 2023 at 12:33 PM
KC - I will have to try the upstream trick. (And it will surprise no one to hear that while I do not have marbles or a hairbrush, I have the other.)
Posted by: theQueen | January 21, 2023 at 03:14 PM
At least you don't smell like a litter box........
Posted by: MA | February 02, 2023 at 08:25 PM
MA - I have found that the trick to littler boxes ls to wear an N95 mask while cleaning them.
Posted by: theQueen | February 02, 2023 at 10:12 PM