Tag: Back Pain

How’s Your Back Feeling

How’s everyone’s back feeling today? Everyone out there in internets land feeling okay?

I woke up feeling okay today, after two days of feeling significantly less than okay. I’m not 100% by any stretch, but I am okay. I tried doing my morning exercise but it triggered the back pain again so I stopped. I am going to have to get it in a little at a time. Also, my desk chair in my office space was a little painful but I put a pillow between my back and the chair back and I’m fine now.

My stomach issues are much better as well, but still not 100%. I have been a little queasy this morning, but it hasn’t stopped me. I had my usual breakfast and I am half way to my liquids goal for the day. I’ve been taking it easy and going slow and while it hasn’t been back to normal, it’s been doable. I am planning to go to the post office at lunch time to drop off the film that I ordered developing for the other day so that is going to put off my next meal for a bit. I think I will be okay though.

Keeping my fingers crossed for no back or stomach back sliding today. Continue to feel better, Robert. You can do it!

The Struggle Continues

The issues from yesterday are still around today. My back is still in serious pain. Tylenol helps, but I’m seeing evidence that each dose wears off faster than the last. That’s not good.

The stomach is still an issue too, but is it really? I barely ate anything yesterday, and it’s been a smidge over 12 hours since the last time I had even the smallest bite of anything, and that was just a single piece of bread. When I woke up and my stomach was off, was it just because it was as empty as my little rewired, redesigned, butchered stomach can be?

I’ve had a little water this morning along with my morning vitamins and another dose of Tylenol. The 15 minute break between drinking and eating just ended. I am about to try eating a protein bar. Will I feel better afterwards? Will I feel worse? I haven’t a clue, but I’ll let you know when I know. Wish me luck, universe!

The Crappy Day Continues

I had a bowl of soup for lunch. Campbell’s Chicken Noodle. Classic. I thought that was safe, given that my stomach issues were fading at the time.

Nope.

The lunch time soup sat in my stomach like a dead weight for hours. At the same time, the back pain came back to me all fresh and new. I had some Tylenol before lunch and it’s safe to say it worked. I had some more about an hour ago and it’s working again. I haven’t had anything to eat in about 4.5 hours and I have to have something, but what?

I think I am going to just try a piece of bread or two. Maybe bread and butter. Something light and simple that hopefully won’t nuke my digestive system again.

Let’s see how this plays out.

In the meantime… cat picture.

51/365
51/365

Sick Day

Didn’t we just go through a whole sick thing?

I woke up with back pain. That’s new. Yesterday Jen and I did a bunch of moving things around in her office and that involved me lifting heaving things and picking them up off the floor and putting them onto a table and back again, over and over again. I think I strained my back a little. It woke me up a little before 5:00am and then made it really difficult to fall back to sleep.

On top of that I was, gastric bypass recoverally speaking, really fucking stupid and I ate WAY too much last night. I knew I was doing it as I was doing it and for some reason I just kept doing it. Like some kind of moron. I felt okay when I went to bed, so I assumed I would continue to feel okay. I did not. My stomach was a gassy, achey mess this morning and it was all my fault.

Those two things combined made it virtually impossible for me to do anything. I tried to go through my morning routine, but 12 oz of water with my vitamins and a two-protein bar breakfast just made the stomach situation that much worse. Also, the existence of the stomach situation made the back situation that much worse.

Generally speaking the treatment for any gastric bypass stupidity is patience. Eventually it will work itself out. I think I am feeling that now. I feel better. Far from 100%, but better. That’s good. My back is a little better too, but it’s still there. The jerk.

So the moral of this particular story is this:

Don’t be a friggin moron.

QED

Busy Monday

It’s been a busy morning. I’m wrapping up lunch right now and I feel like I haven’t had a minute to get my head straight today. I also had like five typos in the previous two sentences. What’s up, Robert?

I’m tired today. I didn’t fall asleep until almost 1:30am. I was then awake at around 7:00am, which is much later than I had hoped. Oh well. I’ll make it through the day and hopefully get to bed early tonight. Maybe. Who knows.

This weekend was busy as well. I spent most of Friday out of work on sick time so that I could stay in the ER with my father. He had massive back pain come up out of nowhere on Thursday. My brother took him to the ER where they waited for nine hours before seeing a doctor. The hospital was 100% full so they couldn’t admit him for the night. He ended up staying in an ER room. I relieved my brother at around 7:00am after his heroic night without sleep. Dad’s pain seemed to fix itself somehow and he was discharged in the mid-afternoon. I got home around 5:00pm or so. Maybe a smidge earlier than that.

From there the weekend of home improvement kicked off. Jen and I made about 650 trips to various Home Depot and Lowes locations. We installed a new cabinet in the kitchen, thanks to huge help from Jen’s step father, Sherman. I installed a wire pull out shelf system which almost killed me. Sherman helped me fix a small issue I was having, and then he installed a counter top onto the new cabinet. It looked great. Jen and I did the finishing work and then started rearranging things in the kitchen. We got some new cookware and saved off the old stuff for when a certain college student graduates and potentially needs a kitchen of her own at some point over the summer.

We were actually thinking about adding three cabinets and a great big pantry and a set of four shelves, but we scrapped all of that as possible overkill. Outside of home improvement, I was only able to get to my mother once. She had a brief moment of awareness when I got there. She asked me to get her a drink. That doesn’t sound like much, but compared to how she normally acts when I am there, that little interaction was huge. A nurse brought her some ice cream too and she devoured it. Normally getting her to eat is a struggle. Not then. She dug in and went after it. It was literally heart warming.

Other than that, there was just a lot of together time with me and my love, Jen. There was a lot of television watched, too much. The Walking Dead and House of the Dragon and Rings of Power are all up to date. Tonight I will go grocery shopping. Tomorrow I have a doctors appointment in the morning. Wednesday we have tons of television to watch. Good stuff.

For now though, lunch is over. Back to work, Robert.

Less Than One to Go

On February 3rd, two months and one day ago, I was told to lose 5% of my weight in preparation for the weight loss surgery. I weighed myself this morning. I have 0.4 pounds to go. I would do the math to figure out what percentage I am at with 0.4 pounds to go but then you could use that to figure out exactly how much I weighed on that first day and I don’t want to let you do that.

I just drank my morning protein shake and had my morning vitamins and supplemented it all with a fist full of Tylenol because holy shit my back is killing me. I don’t know that my back has ever hurt as much as it does at this moment. Oh my shit, my back hurts.

Today’s plan involves going to my parents and picking up my mother and taking her to a doctors appointment. We’re going to get the results of her last blood test and see how her cancer numbers look. They’ve been pretty much perfect for the last year-plus and I am very optimistic that those results will continue.

After that I will come home and find some demo happening in the cellar. First on the list is the grid that until recently held the drop ceiling. After that it’s the rest of the ugly paneling on the walls. Most of the paneling came down during the flood clean up last year. You might recall me bitching about the paneling in the dining room recently. Suffice to say that the paneling in the cellar is 100 times uglier. Tomorrow the electrician is coming to replace the existing fluorescent lights that don’t really work anymore. There used to be six banks of lights with two tubes each. Only two of them still work, (it’s not the bulbs, I replaced the bulbs and the lights stayed dead) and one of those two only works some times. It’s been good the last week because it knows its end is coming and it wants to stay alive, but more often than not it doesn’t work when I flip the switch. Replace ’em all!

On top of that there is something going on at work that I am not going to be around for and I am feeling pretty shitty about that. I feel like I am dropping the ball. I don’t think anyone else feels that I’m dropping the ball, but I do so that’s that. Hopefully it will be quiet today. Fingers crossed.

Did I mention my back was hurting?

0.4 pounds to go. Oh yeah, and the surgery happens one month from today. Yikes!

IKEA Can’t Defeat Us… Mostly

Yesterday was tough. We had one huge cabinet to put together and then hang on the wall. I was dead set against having us hang it ourselves because I knew the end result would look amateurish and Jen would be disappointed. When push came to shove though I said fuck it and we did it. Jen’s folks came over to help but something much more important came up and they had to go and take care of it. That left us flying solo and we got it done.

It took ALL DAY. We were up at 5:00am and we weren’t finished until after 7:00pm, but it’s done! We stood up to the IKEA challenge and we survived!

Except…

We have another big piece of furniture to work on today, and we are both seriously hurting after yesterday. My back and my legs are in really bad shape. Jen has a legitimate bad back, whereas mine is just me being fat, and she is in major pain. It hasn’t gone out on her though so we’re babying it as much as we can.

We’re going to start putting together today’s project. We may not finish it, but we’ll make a good dent.

Wish us luck in our battle against the Swedish* pre-fab menace.

*I couldn’t remember if IKEA was Swedish or Swiss so I Googled it. Apparently they are currently based in The Netherlands! Who knew? Bellana can go visit their headquarters!

Hanging in There

My second day back in the office is about half over. Lunch will be wrapping up shortly. Once again there are not many people around today, but there are more than I feel comfortable with. We are all safely distanced from each other and everyone here is vaccinated. We’re about as safe from the dreaded One Nine as we can be. Still… I’d feel more comfortable working from home. Part of me wants to book a conference room and hide there for the rest of the day. No, I will put my trust in the two vaccine shots and the one booster shot. Hang in there, kiddos!

Speaking of not feeling comfortable, this chair sucks. I have been seriously spoiled. Not only is the chair at my desk at home 1000 times better than the chair at my desk at work, but the chairs at the building we worked out of for the five years or so prior to the pandemic were also 1000 times better. My back is killing me in ways that my back usually doesn’t kill me. Normally my back issues are in my lower back, but today it’s up between my shoulder blades. I blame this sub-par chair and I wanna go home.

I also forgot to open the blinds on the bedroom window that gives Bertha the plant clipping all of her sunlight. I am such a terrible plant dad. Bertha may never forgive me. I’m sorry Bertha.

Back Pain

I’m so fat,

How fat are you?

I’m so fat that my back is in serious pain due to having to hold my ginormous gut upright while I’m standing. When I first stand up I’m good for maybe 5-10 minutes and then the back pain flares up and it becomes hard to move. I can deal with it for a few minutes but then it gets bad enough that I have to sit.

Here’s hoping gastric bypass surgery will fix this particular issue.

Fingers crossed.

First Post of the Day?

It’s almost half past noon and I haven’t posted anything yet? What’s wrong? Did Robbie fall down a well? Did I go into the witness protection program? Did someone tell me that you can catch Covid from wordpress.com so I locked it down?

Nope. Just busy.

I paid that dude $20 to shovel the driveway and, while it was money well spent and I would do it again, the dude did a pretty crummy job. That plus the additional snow that fell after he left means I had to shovel everything again. It’s all done, but my back doesn’t work anymore and the pain is borderline shocking.

Sooooooo I think I am going to sit here at the alternate desk in Jen’s office for a while. Ho hum.

I’ve been able to work on a little music between last night and today so far. I did some drums and bass stuff on two re-recordings. I hope to play some guitar tonight and do some car singing in the morning. I have one song ready to mix as well, so maybe I’ll get to that today? Who knows. It all depends on the pain level.

I still need to mop the kitchen floor, and there is a grocery delivery coming that I’ll need to put away. The rest of the day will be sitting here trying not to let my spine fall off.

Yippee!