Watching My Back

I'm still waiting, albeit impatiently, to find a more regular pattern of sleep; needless to say, such a pattern has not yet emerged. After Monday night's peculiarly refreshing sleep, Tuesday night reverted to the more familiar restlessness; emerging before 10.00am to take a shower on Wednesday, both morning and afternoon necessitated intermittent little naps. By the evening I started to feel a little more awake; not a good sign. Come Thursday morning I was still in the throes of sleep when ma belle ventured off to work (around 7.30am), finally emerging into the new day a few minutes before noon.

And then the cycle repeats, Thursday's late emergence led on to a further night of intermittent sleep, although I did manage to remove myself from the duvet lair around 11.15am on Friday morning and, I then seemed to spend most of the day in an half alert state of being.

Retired to bed at about 10.20pm on Friday evening and then gradually stumbled into a waking state some time after 10.00am Saturday morning. Early in the afternoon I went out into the garden to take a few macro shots, of bees on globe thistles etc., but started feeling a sense of giddyness which persuaded me to go back in the house. Some twenty minutes later I started to have throbbing shooting pains, down my left arm, exceeding the all too familiar aching discomfort of the wrist which is my regular companion!

So, it's panic stations (for me and ma belle) as we head off to the District Hospital when the throbbing pain shows little sign of abating. The good sign is that I'm becoming rather flushed rather than going pale but, we're totally puzzled / worried about this temporarily excruciating addition to my catalogue of ailments. The first nurse who sees me, after about 40 minutes, makes a few notes and checks my temperature and blood pressure, the latter unusually high by my standards, before I return to the waiting area.

After a further 90minutes, or so, I'm called into an examination room where an ECG is administered; at least my heart seems to be OK and, by this time the pain had subsided considerably. A further 40 - 50 minutes later a Romanian doctor comes in and, having sounded my chest and back, and a little chat about Romanian wines, she carries out a few tests on the reactions of my arms and hands to touch. She duly notes an abnormal contraction response in my left bicep before examining the top part a of my spine. Once again as she touches a certain point relatively high on the spine, a quite painful shooting throb goes through my left arm. She notes a degree of misalignment of the spine and thinks that, together with the herniated disc in the lumbar region, could account for much of the pain and discomfort I've been experiencing. As she puts it, I'm sorry to tell you it's a back problem.

An evening in which I took anti-inflammatories alongside a couple of tramadol, and a preparatory mirtazapine, still managed to lead to a night of restless intermittent discomfort rather than a good nights sleep. Today has seen me swaddled in both shoulder and wrist supports as I tackled both dinner preparation and subsequent light gardening chores. Both wrists are currently screaming abuse at me, so once more I resort to ibuprofen, tramadol and, hoping against hope that the mirtazapine will have the necessary sedative effect.