(no subject)

[tylik]

Another of the things that has been coming up recently is that along with underreporting pain (which I do in addition to people being dumb about their pain scale) I also chronicly undermedicate. There are a lot of reasons for this, including the standard "don't want to be dependent on drugs!" (I'm pretty resolved to things like antihistamines, but apparently I haven't quite given up.) And drugs generally make me spacey, which annoys me all the more because being in pain also has negative cognitive effects. I'm always a little afraid that if drugs manage things in the short term, it will be hard to get much support in looking for root causes and long term solutions. (Not that people are jerks, just that they are chronically overwhelmed.)

Anyhow, having had to accept that my strategy was leaving me pretty non-functional much of the time, I decided to try medicating more aggressively. (It helps that I have reason to hope this is a short term thing.) And... well, I'll be. If I've been in a lot of pain recently, I'm pretty spacey even on drugs. But yesterday was kind of amazing - my neck mostly stopped hurting, the rest of my body was fine, I could do pretty much whatever I wanted (which mostly involved my normal morning stuff followed by biking to the farmer's market, spending about four hours at the yoga studio - after my normal class they had a class on restorative yoga, and that just sounded like such a good idea - and heading back and getting some paperwork that I'd been putting off done) and I could focus pretty well. Probably not up to healthy standards, but much better than I've done a in a few weeks, and well enough for it not to frustrate me.

Today... Not so great on the focus. Headaches again - stretching helped, forms helped, meds helped, but not to the point where I cut code or anything. Still, the nice thing about the ridiculous pain tolerance is that I can ignore headaches even if they do impair me, so I just did other things. Like make soup, and bread, bicycle out to the pharmacy and Whole Foods, and clean a bunch of things. (<= always makes me feel better) I had energy, anyway.

Google Maps, BTW, has a walking directions feature, which is pretty cool and a big boost on not being evil. A bit of a mixed thing for biking in Cleveland, though - while it came up with a very nice direct route on pretty backstreets (I quickly lost count of Obama/Biden signs - there were at least three dozen - but I only saw one McCain/Palin the whole trip) the streets themselves were so cracked and full of pot holes that I was relieved to cut over to the main streets.

I feel silly for not doing more errand running via bicycle earlier. A lot of it is just getting to know the area better. (Aaah! Six way intersections!)