It never rains but it pours, right? So much has happened in my life since I began this blog, that it's hard to believe, but that's how my life has been for most of my adult life, although the issues change.
I still have the Organizational Behavior file open to where I left off here, but I'm still doing things related to mom's death, trying to find a condo... and my lumbar is getting worse on top of it. This will be my third spinal stenosis since 2008, and I suspect it's going to be another diskectomy and fusion. Dare I repeat the question about how long it will take for my whole spine to end out in one big fusion? Nah... I can't deal with that. Still, it sort of sits in the back of my head.
Currently I'm up to 400 mg of tramadol a day for my back pain (I also have lesser pain in my legs and feet), I'm having gradually increasing problems with my legs and walking, and my gastro-intestinal system is also taking a hit. Last Thursday evening my g.i. doctor had me drink the stuff that you drink before having a colonoscopy, so you can tell how bad it might be getting. And that isn't helping my mid-section pain any either.
Last Saturday I was pretty nauseous and had to increase one of my meds that helps with that kind of thing, so I didn't make it to church Sunday. I'm expecting that it might be hard to do much extra beyond what I absolutely have to do until the back problem is fixed.
I had an MRI of the lumbar today and I see the pain specialist next week in follow up. If he determines I might need surgery he'll send me back to the neurosurgeon. I can't get in to the g.i. doctor for a month, but at least he's gotten back to me and helped with instructions and gotten me prescriptions. The rheumatologist is checking me out for psoriatic arthritis and sent me to the dermatologist for another skin biopsy (the first one only showed inflammation and the like), and this one the dermatologist thought could be not psoriasis, but basal cell carcinoma (i.e., skin cancer). And since I'm on my third stenosis, I figured maybe it was about time to get the opinion of a orthopaedist, so I see him Friday.
I hope you can appreciate how I might be burned out and not ready to return my focus to this blog. It seems my whole life is turned upside down, in that my home is in limbo, my health is on the fritz (again) and my family is being greatly reconfigured with the death of our last parent.
Most of my attention has been on the condo, since at least the doctors are mostly lined up so I don't have to scramble in that regard like I have in the recent past. But I also know from experience that at some point here I'm not going to be able to do any condo searching because of my health. As it is I have been instructed by my primary care doctor for a month now not to do any lifting, which, as you can guess, might hamper moving preparations. So I feel somewhat of an urgency to try to find something, although I don't expect to be able to actually move until after the surgery (which I assume is in the pipeline).
With all these crises of various stripes I'm not quite up to facing my Vienna experiences head on at the moment, so I hope you will grant me some leniency in this regard. Thanks for your interest.
