I’ve always been a healthy person. When I was little, I had the chicken pox and a few ear infections, but I’ve never had the flu and I only catch a cold or two per year. My main issue is orthopedic. I have scoliosis. Well, I had scoliosis until an orthopedic surgeon opened me up and straightened me out with metal rods and some spinal fusion and a big plate with some screws. The surgeon corrected my 66 degree over 88 degree curves to nearly 100%. He was truly a miracle worker; most people with my problems could only expect correction to 10-20 degrees.
I live with a low level of chronic back pain. I consider it a small price to pay considering that I would have been in a wheelchair if I had not had surgery. However, something went incredibly wrong over the past week or so and my low level of chronic pain started to get a bit more severe. The first insult, I think, came from when the Captain and I took our engagement pictures.
This is probably my favorite of the 40 pictures we took, but it forced me to bend backward in a way that my back is just not used to enduring. I finished out the week taking ibuprofen and things seemed fine. The second, and much more severe, insult came on Thursday when I was getting down on to the floor to insert a urinary catheter into a dog (no, I do not have a photo of that one!). All of a sudden, it felt as though someone were ripping the muscles in my back into tiny pieces. When the pain didn’t go away, I realized that I needed to go to the ER. My first fear was that something went wrong at my previous surgery site. The ER docs explained that I was having muscle spasms and they gave me all sorts of terrifying IV medications and sent me home with muscle relaxers and opioids.
By Friday night, the pain was back with a vengeance. I could barely walk around my apartment. After several phone calls, my mom told me to go back to the ER and that she was driving the 2 hours to be with me. At that visit, they took radiographs and gave me more scary IV medications. Long story short, there was nothing wrong with my spinal instrumentation (I was told that all the metal in my back would likely survive a nuclear blast). I have one narrowed disc space but that is to be expected with someone who has had my sort of surgery.
That brings me to where I am now. I’m sitting at home after missing yet another day of school taking my muscle relaxers and antiinflammatories like clockwork. I really hope that I can get back to school tomorrow, not just because if I miss any more days, I will have to repeat the rotation, but because I do not do well sitting at home. I just don’t know how to relax.
That brings my grand total of ER trips this year alone to 3 visits. That is more times than I’ve been to the ER in all of my previous years (once for milk aspiration when I was a baby, once for a broken arm when I was 4). I’m told that things like these come in 3s so I sure do hope that I am done with the hospital for a while!
