Category Archives: Health

Health Personal

Three steps forward, two steps back

October 23, 2008 – 8:46 am

OK, now I’m getting really pissed off. My back has got slightly better every day over the past week and a half – yesterday I went for my third physio appointment and everything was pretty hunky-dory, just a bit of soreness, but my range of movement was much better and his prodding barely hurt at all. I went more than 24 hours with no painkillers of any sort for the first time in ages, and this morning I felt great.

That is, until despite my being careful I accidentally twisted a very particular way in the shower and had a sudden sharp pain. It was only very fleeting, but now my back feels like it did this time last week – constantly sore and very painful to put any kind of stress on (e.g. bending down, carrying anything). To say I’m annoyed is a very large understatement. I need to be able to carry a rucksack with a laptop in it next week, and up until an hour ago I was feeling really happy that was going to be fine. :(

I’ve been doing some gentle exercise (walking) and it’s been helping a great deal, but it’s terrifying to know that I can do something so incredibly simple in the space of about 2 seconds to completely reverse my recovery process. It’s frustrating in the extreme.

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Health Personal

Ground Control to Major Tom

October 16, 2008 – 10:37 am

Just a quick update on the health situation for those that are interested. I’m still in some pain but appear to be getting a little better each day. I’m still very sore most of the time, and mornings are the worst time as I try to slowly free up the swollen joints that have a tendency to seize up overnight, but I’m getting the knifing pain less and less, and I can walk much more normally so progress is being made. I am, however, still on quite a lot of drugs which means I’m a bit phased out at times. I’m also stupidly thirsty all the time, which is odd.

I’m spending some time at the desk, but I have to take a lot of breaks, and I’m certainly not at peak efficiency – I’m spending what productive time I have mostly on existing customer commitments, so Ogre is getting a little less attention than usual. I was in the forum briefly yesterday but I just cherry-picked a few things, and that’s likely to be the case for the next week at least.

I must say Monday’s events were a major wake-up call for me. As might have been apparent, I’ve had a bit of a peak of activity lately, what with OgreSpeedTree, Ogre 1.6 and a few new work projects coming on stream. I’ve also mentioned how Ogre has mostly slipped back into my spare time again. All in all it’s led to me spending more and more evenings and weekends at the desk again, and doing less and less other activity (Rock Band excluded, although even that suffered). I don’t resent this at all, I love my work, I love being self-employed and independent even with the lack of downtime that brings, and I love working on Ogre – and in addition I’m a stubborn git, so when faced with increasing demands I tend to just get my head down and put increasing effort in to meet it. I did have a few back twinges in the past 4 weeks but I generally just gritted my teeth and coped with it, or rested a bit for a day or two until it was better enough for me to resume business as usual. In hindsight, that wasn’t very wise.

I know, I know – people have been telling me for ages that I need to look after myself better (on this blog and otherwise), but I always find that hard when there’s so much to do. Unfortunately, being the stubborn idiot that I am, it really does take something as major as being carted off in an ambulance to finally get it into my thick skull that I might be pushing it a bit too far.

So, message finally received, loud and clear. My initial focus now is to recover enough by the end of the month to be able to travel without injuring myself (since I have a trip already booked), which means initially lots of rest interspersed with very gentle exercises. Then over the next year or two my goal is to gradually get back to the level of fitness I used to have some years ago (or as close as I can get). Believe it or not, I used to be really very fit in my early 20s, doing runs around the steep cliff paths here, regular martial arts training, all sorts. But that was 13-14 years ago now – if I can get even halfway back to that it’ll be a major boost. That means that instead of letting work take precedence all the time, my health will have to jump up to priority #1 (from about 5 or 6 ;) ). Once I’m well enough to move about properly again, I think I’ll start with something relatively gentle, like swimming, and work up gradually from there.

As an impatient person I’ll no doubt have an urge to speed things up so I can get back to some project or other, but all I have to do is think back to this Monday if I find myself wanting to do that. Time to be more sensible, dumbass. :?

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Health Personal

Esmerelda!

October 14, 2008 – 5:21 pm

I woke up this morning feeling pretty good – sore, but better. Until I tried to move a certain way, at which point it was pain central again. After a couple of hours in which, despite having loaded up on over-the-counter Ibuprofen and Paracetamol it still felt like someone randomly taking a chainsaw to my back, I went to see both a doctor (for ‘pain management’) and a physiotherapist (for longer term help).

The doctor has given me some stronger painkillers and anti-inflammatories which are definitely better, although they do mean I can’t drive or operate machinery because they make you a little dopey, although I do think I’m more qualified to be a patent examiner. The physio after lots of prodding declared my back ‘interesting’ – which is not the first time (I’ve had similar assessments from previous physios and osteopaths) – quite why medical professionals feel the need to infer that my spine is of alien construction I’m not sure. I mean, if by ‘interesting’ they meant it could perform some great superhuman tricks like sprouting barbs (at which point I could find myself a tan brown suit and call myself ‘Hedgehogman’), that would be ok, rather than meaning ‘it’s buggered and we’re not entirely sure why’.

Anyway, his eventual conclusion of why it’s getting worse is that that my posture is actually too straight. That’s right folks, I apparently sit and stand too straight and I’m aggravating an existing injury on my thoracic vertebrae as the various ‘fins’ (technically the ‘processes’) rub against each other, produce swelling and then catch the nerves that are winding their way between. Sitting up straight pushes them together more, and pulling into an upright position from sitting (the ‘demon move’ for me right now) tenses all the muscles around there which also pulls them closer together, which aggravates the nerve, which makes the muscle spasm, which pulls the vertebrae – you can see where this is going. Classic cascade failure :?

So, his advice? Slouch more. Seriously – to take the pressure off these fins while I’m standing and sitting, I’m to deliberately curve my spine in the very way you’re always told is ‘bad posture’. I’m supposed to find relaxed, slouchy positions and then move as little as possible, except for some hourly exercises. When I’m walking, I’m to do it in a slouchy, hands-deep-in-cargo-pant-pockets kind of way. Essentially, I’m to act like I’m 17 again, just without the bad 80′s hair. :?

It’s weird, but it actually helps a bit so far. I spent a little time at the keyboard today, but I did it with the chair tilted back, feet on a footrest, and my keyboard on my lap, slightly hunched in a way I haven’t done for years, since I started sorting out the ergonomics of my work area to alleviate RSI. Who woulda thought such a set up was actually ergonomic in its own right?

I hope all this works anyway. I hate being off work, even partially, and these physio appointments are damn expensive! I probably won’t be in the forums much until this is sorted, if something is really urgent (and I mean really urgent), you can reach me on email in the meantime.

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Health

My first ambulance

October 13, 2008 – 1:27 pm

My brand new-and-improved back problem took a major turn for the worse last night, resulting in a sensation not unlike someone tearing a chunk out of the space between my shoulder blades whenever the muscles that run down the right hand side of my spine contracted. And you know, these suckers contract doing almost anything – sitting down, standing up, even laying down. I got up in the middle of the night and paced around downstairs to try to alleviate it, but to no avail.

I managed to eventually return to bed and find a position that I could sleep at least a bit in, but come morning it was totally unmanageable. Even slight movement led to screaming pain (and that’s not a metaphor – there was real screaming involved, which says something for me since the most I normally utter is a grunt through clenched teeth) – through sheer force of will I managed to at least get into a sitting position, but by then every nerve seemed to be on fire and it was clear I wasn’t going anywhere. I’d already taken painkillers the night before and they hadn’t helped, so in the end my wife had to call the ambulance, because she couldn’t even get me standing, never mind downstairs into the car.

So, down come the paramedics, sirens going, and they decided pretty quickly to give me a shot of morphine so they could at least move me. That was my first morphine experience, and it wasn’t that pleasant, but at least it took the edge off so they could winch me into the ambulance. I spent the morning being pumped full of a shedload of other drugs from diazepam for the spasms to anti-inflammatories and more painkillers. They worked luckily, but I feel like crap now through a combination of sleep deprivation and a cocktail of drugs.

Given the location of the pain they were concerned it might be something internal rather than just back pain, so I had a bunch of tests, xrays and such, but the results were inconclusive. Their best guess is still that I’ve torn a muscle and / or trapped a nerve, and that I should just keep taking painkillers and take it easy. Which is precisely what I’ve been trying to do for the last few weeks – admittedly yesterday I did give a minor amount of help to my brother-in-law to move a dining room table, but it wasn’t a big deal, or so I thought, and certainly didn’t hurt at the time. I’m faced with now pretty much doing no exertion at all for a few weeks to try to let it heal – this is especially important since I have another work trip at the end of the month.

I’m going to have to make even more of an effort not to sit at the compuer screen for long periods too, something that’s very hard when you have a business and open source project to run. :( I wanted to get Ogre 1.6 released this week, but I think I’m going to have trouble just keeping up with my work commitments this week without doing myself an injury, so I may have to delay it again.

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Films Food Health

Super Size Me

September 18, 2008 – 4:53 pm

I don’t watch a huge number of films, but I do enjoy watching them occasionally and I’ve been using LoveFilm for the last couple of months after a friend recommended it. It’s especially good for catching up on films you didn’t have time to see when they came out. This week we had Super Size Me through the letter box, which another friend had recommended to me a while back.

I like documentaries generally, at least the informative ones anyway, and this one was simultaneously informative, funny and utterly disugusting in equal measure. I have to admire the guy for putting his health horribly at risk in the name of research, although I think everyone involved was surprised at just how much damage he could do in 30 days.

Some of the stats were interesting – I really didn’t realise that in the USA (allegedly) 40% of meals eaten by the average person are bought rather than made at home (that includes restaurants, take-out and fast food). To me that’s an incredible number – in comparison in our house I’d guess over 95% of the food is made at home.

But then, I’ve never really understood fast food. I can count the number of times I’ve eaten at McDonalds on one hand (in the 20ish years I’ve been an adult), and it’s always a very, very last resort – usually in airports at 3am when I’m jetlagged, but in recent years even that bastion has gone really thanks to decent airport restaurants being open 24/7. Our Island must be one of the last places in the world with no McDonalds – we did have a Burger King for a few years, but it shut down and is now a cafe / bistro. And don’t get me started on KFC – quite how you can take something as potentially delicious and healthy as chicken and turn it into a greasy, MSG-laden monstrosity I’ll never know (we don’t have any of those either, thank goodness). Probably the most decent food I’ve had from a fast-food joint is In-N-Out Burger (you were right Eric) – I actually saw them peeling real potatoes and mincing real beef, which is certainly a plus compared to the factory processed garbage most of these places use. Even so, I wouldn’t choose to eat it if I had an alternative.

As a bizarre coincidence, I read today that Activision is setting up a promotional partnership between Guitar Hero and KFC. Ugh.

Anyway, worth watching if you haven’t seen it already. Look out for the extras on the DVD, they’re very interesting – they did a decomposition test on ‘real’ food versus McDonalds, and it seems that even bacteria refuse to eat McDonalds french fries because they lasted for 10 weeks in a jar with little to no decomposition. That’s scary.

Now to await the UK follow-up – the health effects of eating nothing but take-out curry for 30 days ;) Or maybe the fish & chip diet; although despite the unhealthy cooking mechanism, at least the ingredients in your local chippie are usually fresh & local, rather than being heavily factory processed like McD/KFC. The curry diet is almost certainly more entertaining though :)

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Health Personal

Snap, crackle and pop

September 2, 2008 – 5:43 pm

I’ve had a long-running back injury (a twisted vertebra in my lower back) which I’ve figured out how to manage through experience – a bit of stretching here, avoid certain types of activity etc. It’s a bit inconvenient but after a while you get used to living with it, and it’s not that painful most of the time provided I don’t go nuts.

However about 2 weeks ago, not long after getting back from LA, I was doing something quite simple (moving a coffee table back after a Rock Band session), when something in a completely different part of my back suddenly hurt really badly.  We had guests at the time, so I quickly took some painkillers and did a quick bit of my usual stretching upstairs, but that didn’t seem to work very well – I ended up just gritting my teeth most of the evening. While I don’t like the existing back injury I have, at least I ‘know it’ and how generally to cope with it, but this time it seemed different – like someone randomly knifing me in the middle of the back, just below the shoulder blades (et tu, Bruté?), rather than just by my right kidney like the old injury always was.

Stubborn git that I am, I gave it a couple of days of fairly frequent hot-poker agony before giving in and making an appointment to see the osteopath. I cancelled it once because it started feeling a lot better before the appointment came up, but then I wrenched it again while doing the grocery shopping of all things (damn you BOGOF offers, you basket-filling temptresses). Luckily I remained on my feet and avoided shouting the foullest obscenities in my repertoire at the top of my voice; no doubt the years of Brit cultural training to avoid making a scene at all costs – stiff upper lip and all that, what? – helped in that regard ;)

Anyway, I finally made it to my second osteo appointment today, although again it had started to recover quite well so I felt a little bit stupid; “that used to hurt like hell” doesn’t have quite the same impact after all. Luckily as a professional he could still tell what I’d damaged even without me yelping, so next came the expected ‘manipulation’ – which basically means ‘beatboxing with your bones’. This time the targets of choice were the Thoracic vertebrae and the attached rib heads, and they can clearly make some quite interesting sounds when properly motivated.

I’ll be sore for a while but with a bunch of new stretching exercises it looks like this one probably won’t be a long-term issue. It’s likely to be linked to the number of hours I spent hunched like a troll in economy class in the last month so hopefully it’ll prove to be a one-off.

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Health

Blood pressure high (or low) score table

January 27, 2008 – 4:07 pm

I’ve never really thought about my blood pressure – I’ve had it checked fairly regularly, but I’ve never previously taken much notice of what the numbers were or anything. Recently though a friend of mine was diagnosed with pretty high blood pressure, which he wasn’t expecting at all, and has had to make a few changes to try to reduce it. So that got me thinking, and since I had to go to the doctor for a routine check-up this week anyway, I thought I’d pay a bit more attention this time.

For those like me who didn’t have any particular idea about this before, blood pressure is technically called ‘vascular pressure’ and is measured via two separate metrics – the maximum (systolic) and minimum (diastolic) pressure in the arteries. Those numbers that they call out in medical dramas (like ‘ninety over fifty and falling!!!’) refer to those two pressure measurements, which are expressed in terms of millimetres of Mercury (mmHg). Apparently the normal, healthy measurements for someone my age is 120/80, ie a maximum pressure of 120mmHg when the heart is at the start of it’s major pump, falling to 80mmHg when it’s resting in between.

So I specifically asked my doctor what the measurement was this time, since he tends to just nod sagely rather than telling me the details. As it turns out, my blood pressure is ‘very healthy indeed’ in my doctors own words, clocking in at 100/65. That sounded pretty low but apparently ‘too low’ is under 90/50 – 120/80 is average but allegedly you should aim a little lower than that ideally, so 100/65 is doing rather well.

That was good news, although now I’m left kinda wondering why, since I don’t feel I’ve really done anything consciously to keep it healthy; I certainly don’t do a lot of exercise anymore compared to years gone by. But I guess I do eat pretty healthily most of the time – I’m not a health nut by any stretch of the imagination, but I do like good food so most of our meals are prepared with fresh ingredients and we favour rice / pasta dishes over heavy or fried foods; that by nature means we tend to eat lots of fresh fruit and vegetables, use olive & peanut oil more than fats, and probably take in a lot less salt than if we ate convenience foods most of the time. I’ll occasionally eat crisps and other junk of course but it’s not that often, probably just once a week. I also don’t drink very much which probably helps – a couple of glasses of wine a week is all I tend to manage these days, barring any social events, and even then my ‘maturing’ metabolism doesn’t seem to be able to handle Guinness like it used to so I mostly stay away from that now. Mostly. :)

You don’t tend to think about your health very much when you’re in  your 20s, but it’s funny how things sneak up on you (like my back injury, and my friends high blood pressure). I guess we could all do to pay a bit more attention to how we treat ourselves sometimes.

 

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Health Personal

Pop goes the vertebrae

January 21, 2008 – 9:52 am

Dammit.

I had (perhaps foolishly) begun to think that I’d put most of my back problems behind me now – it has after all been over a year since I had any significant pain from it; just a few aches / cricks / stiffness occasionally but nothing major. However, while taking a shower Sunday morning I reached down and ‘whallop’ – something popped out (or in my case, rotated since my recurring problem is a twisted rather than slipped disc). I’m guessing that anyone who has had a back injury probably knows what it feels like – a splitsecond before the pain hits there’s a weird ‘weakness’ feeling in the affected area, like when you bend a paperclip too many times and it suddenly ‘gives’. You know in that splitsecond that it’s going to hurt like hell, so you have that tiny bit of time to prepare for it, which I normally fill by preparing my very best expletives. :?

So, that was Sunday down the crapper – simply straightening up / moving was a chore. I know from experience though that you have to keep moving – even though it’s wonderful when you finally find a sitting position that relieves the pain enough to be considered ‘comfortable’, staying there for a long time is a bad idea because everything just seizes up. So I forced myself to regularly get up and move around, stretching as much as I could manage (cue more swearing). It seemed to work, by the late evening I could actually get my back muscles to relax enough that I could stand completely straight for once. Hurrah.

I’m feeling pretty beaten up this morning but it’s an improvement over 24 hours ago – at least I’m no longer recreating the music video for ‘Walk Like an Octogenarian’. I guess I’ll have to spend most of today getting up and down to stretch again, not exactly condusive to productivity but necessary.

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