Tag: health

Mark Time March

I can’t exercise. Every time I try my back starts to hurt like crazy and I have to stop. It’s really frustrating. I’ve ballooned up to the size of a small mountain and I can’t do anything to work any of that largess off.

I was thinking back to marching band, because I am mentally deficient, I guess. We used to do a lot of marching in place. Marking time, it was called. Yesterday I had a moment where my watch gave me a notification that I hadn’t stood up at all for almost an hour so I pushed my fancy desk chair away from my desk and stood up… and started marking time. Just walking in place. I did it for 2-3 minutes and felt a little tiny bit good about myself. It took a while to realize what that feeling was because it’s been so long since I felt it, but eventually my brain worked it out.

I decided I’d try it again today. Just before 11:00am I did it again. This time for five minutes. It left my legs feeling like rubber, but once again I was a teeny tiny bit pleased with myself. Just after 2:00pm I did it again. Five minutes. This time I turned on the exercise tracker on my watch. I feel like I’m going to keel over this time, but again… it didn’t feel like a mistake.

I don’t know if I’ll do it again tonight, but I think fat boy might do it again tomorrow. Once, at least. Maybe twice.

Marching band… for the win? Who woulda thunk it?

Tendinitis

Friday night/Saturday morning, while I was sleeping, the ace bandage I’ve been wearing for my thumb started really irritating my hand. I took it off and went back to sleep. I left it off all day yesterday. I may have also missed an Advil fix while busy with other stuff.

What did I learn?

I learned definitively that I am just as bad as I’ve been for months. Overnight last night there were a couple of times when the knuckle did the thing where the tendon is all swollen and it gets caught on the bone and the knuckle won’t bend. When that first started it felt icky. Now it hurts.

The bandage is back on. Is this ever going to get better?

Total and Complete Epic Fail

I was having a really good day, poison ivy wise. No itchy, no nothing. For the first time in over a week I was feeling confident and a smidge optimistic. I even skipped my planned 2:15pm steroid cream/calamine lotion paste of grossness.

Then…

The clock struck 5:30. The work day was over. Happiness. That was followed a millisecond later by the worst blast of itchy I’ve had since before I went to the doctor. Oh my sweet christmas it was awful. I started scratching, I started bleeding, the dead skin was falling off my arm like an avalanche. It was terrible.

I scratched until it hurt too much to scratch and then I cleaned up the bloody mess and put the various goops on.

I was feeling so good about things. I was really, really wrong.

Damn it.

Questions About Meds

Yesterday, after taking my second of three daily doses of steroid anti-itchy cream, I decided to skip a dose. My arm felt so swollen it was a little sore. By the time I reached today’s first dose I felt a lot better and there wasn’t any question of skipping again. I took it.

Today it was my tendinitis’d thumb that has me questioning things. It hurts just as much as before. I don’t feel any improvement, but keeping the ace bandage on does seem to help. The doc gave me two of them saying that the first one was “gonna get smelly.” Can you wash an ace bandage? I was hoping to get through today before I opened the second one, just so that I could say the first one lasted a week. Today when I put it on it was irritating my skin. Itchy. How ironic is that? I decided to leave it off for a while.

On the plus side, the visual signs of the poison ivy are starting to clear up. There’s that. The anti-itch cocktail of the steroid cream and the calamine lotion and little bursts of cortizone cream are helping a lot, but every once in a while the itch gets so bad that I can’t stop myself from scratching. In fact, actually rubbing the goop onto my skin can sometimes lead to scratching like the world is ending.

Things are better. Things are not right. How long is this going to last? Who the hell knows.

Speaking of my thumb… I want to play some guitar today but… I’m a little scared to try. Agents of Shield and laundry are helping to keep me away from the potentially upsetting discovery that it hurts too much to play.

I don’t like this.

How Did Barry Bonds Do It?

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All those years of taking steroids… the clear and the cream and all that shit… how did Barry Bonds do it?

I’ve been putting a steroid cream on my poison ivy rash for six days now and my arm is all swollen and sore. My upper arm is so swollen it actually hurts a little. If Bonds was using crap like this for years, he must have been as swollen as… well… he must have been as swollen and gross as he actually looked. Lets all think back to the middle of the aughts decade and remember how bloated and cartoony Bonds looked. In just six days I’m already feeling a smidge like that.

How did that steroid using, cheater freak do it?

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Weakness

I am a weak, weak man. Last night I had a moment where I gave in to the poison ivy and scratched a spot on my arm really hard. I took off a layer of skin or so and drew some blood. Ouch. I went to the bathroom to clean it up and while I was there I did it again, right on the worst spot. I scratched hard. I’m pretty sure I took two or three pounds of skin and left a bloody, gory mess. The whole scratching fail lasted for maybe 4 seconds but when it was done it looked like a horror movie set.

Ouch.

Blood, puss, gore. Gross.

It looks and feels a little better now, but it still doesn’t look or feel good. How long is this going to last? Who knows. I do know that if I keep giving in to the itch like that it’s going to last a lot longer than it should.

Thanks, 2020.

So on the Juice

My major league baseball debut has to be imminent. On day three of juicing like a gym rat, my right arm is pretty huge. Of course it’s actually just swollen a little and my skin is so screwed up it feels like it’s pulled tight. Poison Ivy, you know? There are a couple of spots where the rash is actually leaking a little. How gross is that? Whatever, I am huge like Barry Bonds now. Get ready for some seriously long home runs. That garage across the street from Fenway Park is in big trouble.

The Red Sox are playing right now. When the radio broadcast came back from commercials for the bottom of the third inning, the bumper music was Rush – 2112. Sure, we’re losing 2-0 in the third, but Rush will pull us out of it. Sure it’s probably going to be our 10th consecutive loss, but we’ve got Rush.

As I was tying the words, “losing 2-0”, Rafael Devers hit a two run home run to tie the game. Okay. Someone is listening to me. Sure, I’m not going to hit a 500 million dollar lottery…..

……..

………

Nothing?

Oh well. four hours and 45 minutes until I can juice again.

Little Bottle is Little

My little bottle of steroid cream is already running low. I’ve had six doses of juice from it. I might get one more, two if I stretch it. I do get one refill with my prescription, but I was kinda hoping it would last longer than it has. Unless, of course, I won’t need it any longer. It does look a little better than it did 24 hours ago.

Calamine Lotion is kind of a dick. It’s not a lotion, it’s a liquid and it splashes and spills everywhere and it stains everything it touches pink. I’m going to be doing some clothes shopping once all this bullshit is over.

Oh, and my thumb really hurts today.

Hoo-freakin’-ray.

Gruesome

I took a vacation day today. Originally it was so I could be around for my mother’s second dose of chemo. Then I was going to use the day to go to the doctor and get my thumb and my rash looked at. Now… with everything else done, and knowing that poison ivy can be irritated by sunlight and wanting to keep my tendinitis wrapped up, I think I am going to be inside the house and not playing the guitar all day. That and wondering how the chemo is going. I guess I’m just going to spend the day binge watching Agents of Shield.

What was I talking about?

We used instacart yesterday to get some itch relieve stuff. It came in a spray. The spray gets everywhere and it smells pretty powerful. Let’s find an alternative, shall we? Instacart just brought us a cream. I can put that cream on top of the steroid cream that hopefully will clear up the steadily growing nightmare that is my skin right now. I hope it works. The evil spray shit kinda worked… kinda. Kinda made more of a mess than anything else. We will see.

I haven’t taken my photo a day pic yet today. A little part of me wants to take a picture of the rash, but that would be way too gory and gruesome for the poor unsuspecting Flickr viewers. I mean… it’s really gross right now and while I was hoping a couple of doses of juice yesterday would help start to clear things up… nope. It’s worse than it was yesterday.

Instead, how about a picture of my sweet ace bandage. I’ll take it off when I need to play guitar.

353/365

I Am Barry Bonds… Or I Will Be Shortly

Poison Ivy… like… what the hell, dude. It’s a global freakin’ pandemic and you stumble on some Poison flippin’ Ivy and smear it all over yourself like some kind of low IQ lab rat? Could you be any dumber? You were a Boy Scout for crying out loud, you should know better.

Jen bought some over the counter anti-itch spray. It’s helping a little, but I think I put it on a little too heavy. It got into my nose and into my throat and it’s icky. Ugh, if icky is the price of less itchy, then I think I can live.

There may be an upside to all of this though. As I mentioned in my random post yesterday, the Boston Red Sox are monumentally bad. Just… atrociously bad. Seemingly unrelated, but maybe very much related, the doc at the urgent care sent me home with a prescription to fight the Poison Ivy I was dumb enough to rub all over myself. The prescription is for a steroid cream. Isn’t that what Barry Bonds used? The Clear and The Cream?

Could it be? Could it be that I am going to take the same thing Barry Bonds took (no, it’s not) when he cheated his way to the title of Major League Baseball Home Run King? Do you think that the Boston Red Sox might be calling me soon? I used to pitch in youth baseball when I was like 14 and I can’t be any worse than the pitchers they are getting slaughtered with now, right? Steroids worked for Roger Clemens. I mean, yeah his skill level without the steroids was higher than mine (a little) to begin with, but if I take steroids too…. I could win 20 games AND hit 40 home runs for them.

Give me a minute to goop this stuff on and then give me a call, Red Sox!