Tuesday, February 21, 2012

Pancake Day

It's Shrove Tuesday, Pancake Day here in the UK. I've blogged about it in previous years so I'm not going to bore you all with it except to say that as usual I've eaten too many and now feel a bit bleah.

Today is also (in the two-thirds of the world that write the date as day/month/year) a palindromic date 21/02/2012 reads the same backwards. I love dates like that, big kid that I am.

I'm posting tonight's updates a little early because I want to go to bed early (with some heavy-duty painkillers) as I'm in a fair bit of pain and I'm so tired I can hardly see straight. My shoulder is killing me. I am always aware of it, there is always a kind of dull, background ache to it. There always will be. The docs tell me I'll never be completely pain free. I can live with that. But for about six weeks or so the pain has been increasing from "dull ache which needs painkillers sometimes" into "hurts like hell and can't sleep without strong painkillers". And this past week (since about Thursday) it's reached "bloody agony and even high-strength codeine won't touch it and I'm not sleeping".

So yesterday I phoned the doc and said, "I think what you told me might happen has happened."

When I was injured, the very first emergency repair job they did on me required that all the nerves in my shoulder were severed, and some of them had chunks removed. The second and third operations required further cuts/removals, because nerves grow back. (Did you know that?? I didn't before that.) And they were growing slightly skew-whiff. After my final operation they said that they'd tried to set it so that the nerves would re-grow and join up over the plates in my shoulder, but that there was a possibility that they might grow under the plates. The first was more desirable but the second was acceptable.

There was, however, a remote chance that they would attempt to grow between the plates. This would be a bad thing as every movement I made would crush the nerve between the plates, resulting in nerve-ending shredding, reducing the chances of re-connection, and also in incredible pain from the nerve endings. If this happened I would need another operation and thin plastic tubing would be inserted in my shoulder, partially covering the nerve endings, so that they could be "persuaded" to grow along the tubes and re-join that way. Why the hell they didn't do that right from the start God only knows.

It looks as if the remote chance wasn't that remote. Or my nerves are as ornery as the rest of me and deliberately grew through the worst possible path. So I'm in for a scan on Friday, to check if they have done what the doc, the surgeon, and I, all think they have done. I've been told to act as though I'm having an op - don't eat in other words, because if they are between the plates then they'll do the surgery asap as a day-case. (They booked an appointment for me just in case).

If they do then I'm off work next week. Which since no work = no pay isn't improving my mood at all. Ah well. Can't be helped I guess. At least they've given me some really strong painkillers (Tramadol) so I might get some sleep tonight.

Ze

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