Keep rolling on

Now early February and the neck and shoulder are still causing problems. Have continued physio from Laura @ Berg and I feel there's been some slow improvement over the last few weeks. While the pain in the arm plus the pins & needles down the arm are still severe particularly during and after driving, there's been an overall small reduction. The neck itself is much more mobile than at the start of the treatment. 

Last week I had my head X-rayed...

Actually it was a scan of the neck but other than cortisone I thought some humour needed to be injected.

The X-rays looked nondescript to me but Laura interpreted them and I now have some broken bones in my neck. This sounds too heroic.. On a couple of neck vertebrae I have some excess bony spur growth. While not unusual Laura did say she hadn't seen any as pronounced. The spurs do not seem to contributing to any of the problems. However Laura's description of my neck as "messy" didn't sound too good. The shape of the neck is curved not straight - this is obvious when you see me. Over the last few years I've become stooped. The Little Worker attributes this to a mix of chemo, long hospitalisation and weight loss. Old age can be chucked in too. Kyphosis [the bent back] is not fixable so I'll always be shorter than my passport height of 185cm. Adam has a lot to answer for. The discs in the neck are more pronounced towards the front and more narrow towards the rear. The gaps between the vertebrae should be roughly equal front & back. Again not fixable. The holes the nerves run through are being squashed by the exaggerated neck position and it's the squeezing of the nerve that ultimately causes the pain, pins and needles. During the last three physio sessions two physios have worked on me: Dave Berg giving my neck a real squeeze while Laura stretching and manipulating my right arm which allows the nerve room to move through its sheath. This reduces the tightness and relives pain at least for as long as Dave has my neck in a death grip - eat your heart out Spock.

The next stage of treatment is for a cortisone injection into the neck. The CT guided injection will hopefully provide long term relief from the current symptoms. I just need my GP to write the referral - to keep Medicare happy and then organise the time when I can get taken to and from the doctor's room as I'm not allowed to drive. Can't say I'm entirely enthralled with the whole idea.

Apart from me and my medical adventures the rest of the family also keep the local medical agencies on their toes. My son woke last Thursday with a sore eye which progressively got worse and of course he ended up with The Little Worker pulling an all-nighter @ TCH Emergency. While he was dosed full of codeine then oxycodone, as the pain was excruciating, the doctors first thought he'd been afflicted by a mite that lodges in the corneal tissue and exudes a toxin. This condition known as [amongst other names] Christmas eye is not uncommon in this area. He was initially treated with a contact lens bandage. This was unsuccessful and later removed. The current theory is that somehow he's managed to remove some of the corneal tissue. In either case it's been an extremely painful episode. And at time like this home is the best place to be. So The Little Worker and I have missed some days at work to keep an eye [no pun intended] on our son and make sure his regimen of eye drops, ointments and lubricant get applied at the right frequency and in the right amounts.

As many friends have recently said - we should get Frequent Flyer points from local medical institutions. If we did, we'd be laughing or at least smug.