 Lets talk about empty promises and summers of pain.
The best laid plans of mice and dan do oft go awry. In a recurring pattern, I make not so outrageous claims for the future, that while plausible, often don't come to fruition after I have told people about them. This means that most things that I think up and get excited about enough to tell people about usually get scrapped before they get off the ground. I'm more of the creative than the creator.
And you're wondering what this has to do with you. Well this pertains to you because I had planned for Danwho dot net to flourish this summer, updating regularly with new material and finally getting around to launching the many short films I've made with friends over the years. And so far none of that has happened, despite having a folder of updates partially written and the films shot and ready for transfer to digital medium.
I addition, I have ideas for some new short films and I have been getting paid to learn php and have all kinds of ideas for a new site and ways to make tjpants better.
So I want to apologize, but then make excuses. See maybe this is not cool but I tend to make excuses, and I usually have good ones. Part of that comes from being able to rationalize good reasons for not doing something, but the other part comes from shitty stuff that actually prevents me from doing what I intend.
The reason that I haven't gotten around to showing up for our online gettogethers isn't that I have been working 40+ hour weeks, and taking an online JMU course and a inperson county course. Which I have been. But that's not the reason.
And yes its a full schedule and I'm tired and have been going to bed early and waking up earlier, but I knew that this summer was going to be a lot more work than my regular school year was, which isn't saying a whole lot considering I didn't have a job and could only take 12 credits because of academic probation.
The real reason I neglect you is because you're painful to talk to. Thats not a personal jab, its just that about every minute that I am awake is spent in incredible pain, so I try not to spend any more time than neccessary awake, which makes for a very dull life, and leaves very little opportunity for free time.
Why am I in pain, you ask? I have a very large herniated disc in my lower back which effects every aspect of my life and causes alternating pain, burning and numbness in my back , left hip, leg and foot. I've had this problem since February, but at that point it was just a nuisance, something that made me walk a little funny sometimes after sitting in class for too long.
My doctor brushed it off with some pain pills and muscle relaxers, go dope up and call me if it gets worse, its probably nothing...The pain pills were just prescription strength Aleve and the muscle relaxers made me drowsy and spacey, but had no real effect on the pain.
It slowly got worse but still was nothing I couldn't deal with, so I saw a chiropractor over spring break at home in March. The first few visits yielded a slight improvement and I was sure he knew what he was talking about when he diagnosed me as having a slight gap where my spine met my pelvis because my left hip was further back than my right.
So when I came home from school in May I kept seeing the chiropractor and each time the pain grew instead of getting better. I started working a temp job 8:30-5 in a warehouse disassembling the metal girders that made the racks. The company was going out of business and I was helping to take it apart, chock full of heavy lifting.
This was probably the worst job for someone in my condition, but I went to the temp agency ready to work immediately and they had me on the job the next day. So I sucked it up and as long as I kept moving and didn't sit down and let the swelling take over I was able to make it through the days with handfuls of pain pills.
Until one day when i couldn't move out of bed and had to quit. I went to another doctor and they shoved some more of the same pills that did very little but distract me, and told me it was probably sciatica, a muscle inflammation that bothers the nerves and shoots down the leg, which would explain why my whole left leg was numb.
I was instructed to go to physical therapy, to work on the sciatica but was informed that I would probably have it my whole life and have to do a lot of stretching and heat and ice when it flared up...but it could be a disc problem, nothing to worry about except that in severe cases paralysis was not out of the question.
So I started physical therapy which once again seemed like the answer for the first few visits. The physical therapist thought that it seemed less like sciatica and more like a disc problem in my spine, which would need to put back into place, not really her line of work. She did mention that if left untreated that paralysis was a possibility. This trend of medical professionals telling me not to worry but just to keep the option for paralysis open in the back of my mind was beginning to get my attention.
I would come into the office hunched over and shuffling like an old man and spend hours at a time on a massage table laying on my stomach letting gravity pull the disc into place. After these first few sessions I was able to stand upright with minimal pain but then couldnt sit down without reverting to my hunched painful state.
The worst pain came in transition between my two states. I could be hunched over and be able to sit, or stand upright but only be able to lay down on my stomach. Switching between the two states was a task that took hours of wincing and pills galore. And even when I was decided on only standing and laying, try getting up into the standing position from laying down without bending your back at all, not easy.
Around this time I started my internship with Sportcraft working in their IT department, getting paid to learn the PHP coding language and work on their website. The experience alone would have been enough for me to jump at the position. The job is great but requires over 40 hours of sitting per week. Which makes the hours seems like I dunno...90 minutes? and leaves me a hunched over mess shuffling around in my shirt and tie, reading php reference websites and giving HTML refresher courses to coworkers.
After a few visits to physical therapy everything that she did to treat me just made things worse, which left me in pain and frustrated and worried her. One session I spent near 3 hours in the office because I couldn't move off the table to get up, I was stuck there and she did everything she could think of to alleviate some of the pain so I could at least go home.
Usually physical therapy is prescribed after the problem has been properly diagnosed and corrected. The problem in this case was that the physical therapist had seen me three times a week and had gotten to know my ailment much more than the doctors who threw pills at me and returned to their full schedules of appointments. The problem was never really fixed, how can I go to therapy to recover?
My last session, my physical therapist told me she was going to call my doctor and tell him what she thought was actually wrong with me, but she didn't want to tell me because she thought it was pretty serious but it was not her job to diagnose and she didn't want to worry me if she was wrong. How much you want to bet it involved the possibility for paralysis?
My doctor gave me a referral for an MRI, which I was overjoyed at getting, because finally the ball would be rolling towards an actual diagnosis. When the results came back it turns out that I had a very large herniated disc and my next course of action is to see an orthopedic surgeon who specializes in the spine. He believes that my herniated disc is too large to correct with an epideral injection which leads me to believe that surgery is the way this thing is heading.
Oh yeah and he made sure to tell me that often this can lead to more severe problems like surprise, surprise...paralysis.
Hopefully I've mentioned the chance of being paralyzed enough times that I've jinxed it and there's no way it can come true...paralysis, there that's reassuring.
We all know that Fidel Castro dressed up as Marilyn Monroe and gave John F Kennedy a case of syphillis so bad that it blew the back of his head out (stephen colbert)
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