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I finally wrapped my head around school shopping. I've decided that this year I need to fix up my bug out bag with a mobile med kit in one of those plastic pencil boxes (I'm always needing alcohol wipes and latex free bandaids or a nail clipper), a mobile post office (cards, stamps, address labels, birthday confetti, address book, colored pens), and possibly several other organized kits. It's silly being caught flatfooted so often. I thought about mailing out a birthday card to my sister 3 different times, and I finally sent it off today and it's going to be late. Anyway, I've also been anxiously checking for my college to show up in the back to school stuff, and there we go, today there was suddenly a whole bunch. And of course, Bunny has corrupted me, I found adult sized Shopkins sox, so I'm ready for back to school now.
I saw my neurologist today for 6 month follow up. I've been going every 6 months for several years. I've had 2 full needle workups making sure my nervous system is still working ok, and he coaches me into physical therapy and meds here and there. He's rather insisting that I try to ramp back up and hold at 300 mg of gabapentin 3x a day again. (I've tried it 3 times now, I keep coming back down to 200 3x.) The ultimate goal is to keep me moving as much as possible, particularly now that I have 'frozen shoulder' coming on, which is when the entire shoulder area gets so difficult to lift that you finally just can't, and the muscles 'freeze' up as they harden with scar tissue. Between the ancient car accident and subsequent years of fibromyalgia, and now arthritis starting to show up with the documented nerve impingement, I'm on my way to losing that arm if I don't keep using it as much as I possibly can. The last round of therapy last spring was brutal, but I am still retaining full range of motion even though the pain is pretty sharp and it's hard to keep moving through it. And by sharp I mean like someone stabbing me hard with a long needle into the nerve that runs over the top of my shoulder. I've been working on this arm since 2015. It was so bad in 2015 that I could barely use that arm at all, and I was close to losing the use of my fingers. I remember my mom's arms and hands finally just curling up until her hands were just fists. Aging doesn't have to be that horrible, but it takes a bit of effort to slow that down if you've got aggressive illnesses like diabetes and/or arthritis.
I'm already hearing stories about knee surgeries, lol. Scott's coworker said whatever I do, do NOT skip the pain med coming off the anesthesia. He said that was about the worst pain he ever went through till the med could kick in again. Personally, I've been through so much pain I kinda doubt I would think it's the worst, but I sincerely don't want to feel it, no.
Today's blood pressure in the office was 151/94, so it's going up again, and obviously both pain and diet related. Even with cutting calories, I'm still getting too much salt. I totally felt that yesterday. I ate an ounce of Cabot seriously sharp cheddar with a normal portion of bite sized Tostitos corn chips and wowzers, talk about a nasty headache. I'm getting so salt sensitive it's unbelievable. I started looking up diets for hypertension and ran into the DASH diet, which is part monitored fasting and mostly very restricted processed animal proteins and lots more fruits and veg. Since my diabetes is already well controlled through diet, now I've gotta control sodium. I obviously can't eat the amount of grains that DASH recommends (too carby), and I can't do the nuts and legumes (allergies), but I can definitely eat more veggies and substitute yogurt for cheese. I'm also going to cautiously try some fasting, but more like how you calorie restrict before a digestive system procedure and you have to empty your whole gut. They make sure you still get 500 calories of clear liquid, but if I do that I'll have to be smart about it, because it can get dangerous on a busy day. I'm not very good at powering through a headache, and I tend to get goofy and make poor decisions anyway, so I'll save that for days nothing is going on.
Oopsie, got lost in youtube. Time to move along.
