Tag: pain

What I Learned Today

Here are a couple of little things that I learned about myself today.

From about 6:30am through about 1:30pm I pretended I was a musician.  I took the four remaining unfinished songs from my 2007 RPM failure and worked them over good.  Three of the songs had rhythm guitar/bass/drums finished.  The one remaining only had drums and bass finished.

So what did I get done today?  Wrote and recorded lyrics and melodies for all four, finished the one missing rhythm guitar part, and recorded the lead guitar on three of the four songs. 

So you’re still wondering what it was I learned about myself today, right?  Well here goes.

I learned that for me, practice is wicked important.  I am way out of practice both as a guitar player and a singer.  It shows most clearly in my pathetic sense of rhythm.  My timing has been just the tiniest bit off all day long.  At a casual listen it sounds almost all right, but when I am paying attention everything just feels sloppy.  It’s… off. 

I’ve always had a problem keeping myself in phase, as it were, but lack of practice seriously exacerbates the issue.  (Yes, I just used exacerbates in a sentence that wasn’t referring to Shaun of the Dead.  100 points for me!)

I also re-learned just how important calluses are when playing guitar.  I needed about 10000000 takes to get the leads right on one of these terrible songs today and I now have the searing agony in my finger tips to prove it.  The blisters are forming.

The good news is, I am close to having four (4) more songs finished.  Bad timing and crappy soloing aside, that’s not bad for a random Tuesday, eh?

Happy Thoughts Request Explaination

Okay, I’m going to give a quick explanation of why I keep asking the internet to send us happy thoughts and positive vibes.

My beautiful, radiant, amazing wife started having a couple of weird things happen on the side of her face.  At first it was short periods of numbness or tingly, pins and needles feelings.  After a while she also started having shorts periods of unbelievable pain in the same spot.

She went to the emergency room and they told her it was  a sinus infection and gave her antibiotics.  When they didn’t affect anything she went to her doctor, who sent her to an ear/nose/throat doctor who sent her to a neurologist.   The ENT doctor used the term Trigeminal Neuralgia.  That scared the shit out of us.  The condition is, according to wikipedia and a few other sources, also known as suicide disease.  On top of that it us often a symptom of other illnesses such as brain tumors and MS.

The neurologist sent her to get an MRI.  The MRI hinted at increased spinal fluid pressure, but did not definitively give a cause of the numbness and pain.  The neurologist sent her to an ophthalmologist and ordered a spinal tap.  The spinal tap relieved some of the spinal fluid pressure, which helped for a day or so.

We then went back to the neurologist who said he didn’t know what the cause of the numbness and pain was, exactly.  You would think we’d be upset about that, but we were actually happy.  For two reasons.  First, he ruled out all of the really scare things that can cause trigeminal neuralgia.  He said it was not MS, not hemorrhaging, not an aneurism, not a clot, and not a tumor.  He actually said, “its not a tumor” in an Arnold Schwarzenegger voice which gained him huge 1990 pop culture points.  He also refused to call whatever is going on trigeminal neuralgia.  He called it an unknown trigeminal nerve event.

So the reason I kept asking the universe for happy vibes was because we were either going to a procedure or a consultation and we wanted as much good luck thrown toward my beloved wife as possible.

Like I said, we still don’t know what’s causing the problem, but we have been thoroughly reassured that it is not anything dangerous.  The current theory is that she either had or has a very low level infection that was too mild to be caught on any of the tests they ran that is causing the nerve on the side of her head to act screwy, and is causing an increase in spinal fluid pressure.

At this point, I don’t care what it is as long as it stops.  I don’t want my love to have to deal with this anymore.

So if you took a millisecond or two to send a happy thought in our direction recently then I thank you on behalf of the woman of my dreams who I love so much.  It was appreciated.

What the Hell is Up with My Foot?

This is a true story.

Really.

No kidding.

On Monday morning at about 3:45am or so I woke up.  I don’t know what woke me up, but I got out of bed and drained the lizard (pardon the metaphor) and then looked out the window to see if it was still snowing.  It wasn’t.  I then went back to bed and fell asleep right away.

At a little before 6:00am I woke up again.  The alarm had gone off and, while I had a vacation day booked and had no plans to leave the house, I got up to brush the snow off the cars so my sweet wife wouldn’t have to.  As I was trying to sit up I thought to myself that there was something wrong with my foot.  It hurt a little bit.  I then put my feet on the ground and stood up.

Holy Toledo!

Damn, did that hurt!  The pain is on top of my foot, maybe off to the side a little, just South of the big toe.  What had I done to deserve this?  I put on a shoe and it hurt a lot.  I was a little swollen, I guess.  I went outside and did my thing.  My beautiful bride left for work and I went back inside.  I changed into a dry pair of shoes and there was still some pain and discomfort but it wasn’t as bad as it had been.  I think it was because my shoes fit snugly and were offering some nice support.

Last night just before bed I took my shoes off and the pain came back.  Through the night it was bad enough to wake me up a couple of times.  Today at work I have a real limp and it hurts pretty much constantly.

So the question is, what the hell happened during the two hours or so I was sleeping between 4:00 am and 6:00 am?

I think the cat had something to do with it.  I know she’s plotting to kill me.  Duh.  I mean, what else do cats do with their time?  But in this case I think she was messing with me.  I think she performed some surgery on my foot and maybe removed a bone or a tendon or something.  Our cute little Patches is just psycho enough to try something like that.

I’ll keep a closer eye on her from now on.  I’m watching you, kitty.

I’m watching you.