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Health Personal

Rise and fall of the spine

December 2, 2008 – 11:35 am

Apologies in advance for another dull post about my varying spinal health. But, I figure friends, family and some people in my various online communites are interested in contextual stuff like this, so here we go. Hit up some other bookmark now if you’re bored :)

Since my epiphany 6 weeks ago I’ve been on what I realise is going to be a long road to recovery, and generally each week I’ve been improving, barring the odd minor blip. That was, until the middle of last week when I seemed to go backward a couple of steps, ending up with pain and stiffness in the middle back area which I associate with my most recent problem (as compared to the lower lumbar pain associated with my lingering problem from about 4 years ago). This has persisted all week – better some days, worse others – meaning that I’m having to be extra careful. I’m not sure exactly what triggered the relapse – it might be that Rock Band 2 came out and I did 2 hours of solid drumming one evening, it might have been the time we spent playing Left 4 Dead, it might have been that I’ve been playing my new guitar with a strap (extra weight on the shoulders), it might have been that I took a particularly brisk walk last Tuesday as I was in a rush to get back to work (and at that point my back was feeling great) – or something else.

What is frustrating is that the risk of relapse seems connected to almost anything I do. I sometimes feel trapped – that I can’t work as much as I want, can’t do many things I enjoy, can’t be too active, can’t be too inactive – it’s like I have to be afraid of doing anything because of the risk of setting it off again (except that of course doing nothing also makes it worse). Yesterday this really started to depress me a bit, and I’m generally a pretty hard guy to depress, being as defiantly optimistic as I usually am. I got over it, partly because of my wife, partly because we had a social evening last night which cheered me up, and partly because my ever-reliable sense of logic eventually kicked in and pointed out in no uncertain terms that feeling sorry for myself wasn’t going to help, and I was just wasting time.

So, I’m opting for a more scientific approach. I’m starting to keep a weekly record of how well my back is feeling, and noting down relevant events, and how much work/gaming/exercise I get during each week to try to correlate what’s helping, and what’s making it worse. I went back over my diary & blog to add a bit of history (higher numbers are better):

Obviously too much hunching at the desk was bad, as probably were long-haul flights. The games are mostly on there for interest – with the exception of heavy drumming on Rock Band 2 I don’t think any of them put any particular strain on my back, although Left 4 Dead is at the desk so I should keep that fairly light. Trips to the physio/osteo clearly help short-term but the only real way to conquer this long-term is to keep learning how to rehabilitate myself, and quick-fixes aren’t the way.

The positive note to take from this is that despite the last week, I’m still on an overall up since mid-October. As my wife keeps telling me, I need to resign myself to the fact that this is probably going to take a very long time to put right properly. Frustrating when you have a head full of projects (Ogre & otherwise) wanting to see the light of day, and when you just want to lead a ‘normal’ life without being in pain, or feeling afraid of what you can and can’t do. But, as ever there are plenty of people far worse off than I am in the world, and I have the benefit of a very understanding wife and a flexible working environment (I don’t get sick pay, but I can at least take breaks when I want and set my own workload), so I should stop wingeing and get on with it. I’m going to choose to be grateful that my red line is averaging an upward trend, and work on trying to keep it on that course as best I can.

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Business OS X Personal Travel

Milestones

October 3, 2008 – 2:38 pm

I’m the kind of person who likes to keep busy; not in a ‘mad about DIY / the garden’ kind of way that tends to be the most socially acceptable form of being a ‘project oriented person’, but I always have a bunch of things on the go and never seem to have enough time to do them all. I’m always ‘working’ evenings & weekends, but a lot of the time I really don’t think of it as work, because a large portion of the time I’m doing exactly what I want to do.

If you’re anything like me you’ve had difficulty explaining to your wife / significant other that in our kind of world, there’s really no discrete black-and-white transition between ‘work’ and ‘not work’ that starts at 9am and ends at 5pm every day like clockwork. In fact there are a multitude of subtle levels ranging from ‘definitely work’ (e.g. something I don’t particularly want to do but someone has paid me to do it), to ‘not really work at all’ (e.g. having fun with technology that as a spin-off might help make a living now or later). Unfortunately these subtle graduations are invisible to the casual observer, often leading to discussions which begin with ‘You’re working again!’, ‘Not really…’, and from then on get complicated.

In the end, it’s probably not a solvable problem, but one thing that does help is taking the odd break, where you at least pretend not to think about what others would deem ‘work’ for a while. Holidays are obvious candidates, but also a good trigger for maybe taking a weekend off or something is recognising a milestone, or a cluster of milestones.

OgreSpeedTree and OgreSpeedGrass emerged from beta this morning, with official 1.0 versions being released. I’m pretty damn pleased with the result, and that’s a fairly unusual situation; I normally have a list of things as long as my arm that I consider ‘unfinished’, but in this case I’m very content with stamping a 1.0 badge on them. My attention can now switch to finalising Ogre 1.6, which is currently at the Release Candidate stage.

It’s also 2 years since I made the decision to give up having a regular day job and try my luck as a free agent / start-up. My initial measure of success was not to go broke (either personally or bankrupting the company) in the first 2 years, and I’m pleased to say that hasn’t happened. It’s certainly had ups and downs, and probably given my prior senior tech position I’ve undoubtedly earned less personally as a result, but the company has still grown, I’m still paying myself a wage that isn’t too insulting, and the benefits have easily compensated for that. Besides the flexibility and the satisfaction of knowing I’ve found and earned every penny I’ve made (which somehow makes the money feel more valuable than a guaranteed monthly paycheck), it’s been good for my personal development to mix it up a bit. And most importantly, I’m not bored :)

It’s also almost 8 years ago that I wrote this fateful message in my (very old, very manual) blog:

“18th October 2000: Exam done! Work on OGRE will restart soon. First, web site revamp to be done.”

Inauspicious, but that was the seed – the time when OGRE as we know it swung into full development and started this whole crazy sequence of events off; if I’d known the significance of it at the time, I wonder whether it would have affected how I did things?

Laozi was right when he said “A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step.”. Those words motivate me to this day – that no matter how big or challenging something looks, the most important thing is to start. My experience certainly tells me that genius and raw talent / ability is often not the most important factor when it comes to achieving things, it’s usually more about taking that first step, and having the tenacity or pure bloody-mindedness to keep going for as long as it takes. That’s particularly good for me since even if I might not be as smart as some, I’m probably more stubborn. :) And that in turn feeds back into what I was talking about at the start of this post.

But, stopping occasionally to admire the view is good too :) Maybe I’ll do that this weekend.

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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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