'Significant Findings'

 I spent several boring (and unexpectedly painful because spasm) hours inside a loud vibrating tube yesterday. I then spent several more last night going through the DVD they burnt for me and looking at MRI pictures. Hello, more royalty-free Halloween decor, right?

But, while I have only enough anatomical training to get myself into trouble, certainly not enough to interpret an MRI, and also only the free "lite" version of the MRI viewer app, there were definitely some things that looked to my untrained eye, um, not good.

Today, in the middle of a meeting about my company getting acquired (oh yeah, so um that happened since I posted uh, six days ago) I got a call from a phone number I recognized as being the "outlet" number for my doctor's office. It was my PCP; she left a voicemail that said drop her an email and she'd call me back. 

It's never routine or good news if the doctor wants to give it to you in person. I left a message and she called back just as I was sitting down to eat lunch.

There were "significant findings" and as she read back the neck diagnoses ("moderate disc extrusion", "severe central canal stenosis", "foraminal narrowing") my hands started to tingle and I realized that for the first time in almost a month it wasn't the pins-and-needles pinched nerve feeling but the clammy panic tingling. "So it sounds like you're seeing a specialist tomorrow... two of them? I'm really glad. Neurosurgery was the right call, I know you weren't sure, but they'll know what you options are." 

The shoulder diagnoses after that were almost routine by comparison, and while scary, a certain amount of Googling revealed that about half of the narrative findings meant "this body is over the age of 30", while the rest are scary  ("tendinosis", "Superior labral tear", "adhesive capsulitis") but seem to have knowable solutions or fixes. And yeah, just enough anatomy to get myself into trouble means that I probably, while trying to fix a nerve thing that cannot be fixed, stretched myself into an actual cartilage injury. 

I am fucking terrified.

This last month has been a haze, more so than the last seven months of corona quarantine. I hurt. I hurt so much and in so many different weird and annoying ways that I've stopped bothering to catalog them and just go for the pain meds. This is unsustainable. I worry about my liver and kidneys and stomach lining and worry about the things I might be breaking while I've numbed the lot of it away. 

But also I worry that I will never get back to a "normal" again, where partner dancing, climbing on art, swinging a hammer, doing things with my arms, just generally being strong and fit, is really possible again. I'm staring down the barrel of a lifetime of "pain management" rather than healing and relief and I am trying so hard to convince myself that that's a life worth living. It's so hard in the middle of all of this, when we've all lost so much, and when the mitigations for the pain could compound the loss of leisure.

It's been hard enough this last month when I really want a tiki cocktail for dessert, trying to recall how much tylenol I've had and if I should just skip it. And the comfort-sugar cravings have come on in force, which sucks because I got to see quite plainly in the MRI how thick my subcutaneous fat layer is now. 

I can't focus at work, writing hurts my wrist, I worry that reading makes my neck issue worse, and I've run out of internet that I want to read. Politics is a cringeworthy grind I'd rather hide from, climate change is real and the heatwave here is about to cause some folks on my list to get their power cut to try to prevent another firepocalypse, and I'm finding that I really just want... to curl up somewhere... and wake up six months from now.

But first I have an 8am orthopedist appointment, God help a night owl.