Category: Personal

One of the things that threw me when I moved to California is that one must drive everywhere. Okay, that’s not true everywhere in California, but most of the Bay Area is oriented around cars, with little mass transit and large gaps between places one wants to go. My regular routine takes me anywhere within a 10-mile distance of my house every single day. While I could bike that, I don’t really want to bike everywhere (nor do I have the time to). All this is quite different from living in Madison, WI, where I lived right downtown, and could walk almost everywhere I wanted to go. I still drove some places, but a 10-mile drive there would take me to the edge of town.

Even once I bought my house, I still didn’t have many places I walked to. It’s about a 30-minute walk to downtown from my house, which is a bit far for most of the things I go downtown for. Maybe I’ve just been inculcated with the California driving mentality, but I don’t want to spend that much time just travelling around. (I like biking, but not that much!)

Recently, though, I’ve realizing that I actually have several places that I now walk to regularly, because they’re just a few blocks from my house:

1. My friend Chris hosts our Monday night Magic games and lives at the other end of the block from me.
2. Another fellow hosts a regular low-stakes poker game and lives even closer to me than Chris does.
3. We have a 7-11 in one direction and a Starbucks and a decent “fast food” Chinese restaurant in the other direction. There’s hope that the discount supermarket will open in the latter location soon, too.
4. A great burrito place is three blocks from my house.
5. And my polling place – which I visited this morning for the California special election – is about 5 blocks away.

I could probably walk even more than I do, but I was thinking this morning while going to vote that it’s nice to have these places to walk to from time to time. Makes me feel more like I really live in the area, rather than that I live in one place, get in my car, and magically end up in some other place.

This morning it was back to the doctor, this time to see the dermatologist as my body has developed a few blemishes which my GP thought were worth having looked at by an expert. The dermatologist looked me over and said that the two large bumps I’ve got are probably some sort of nerve cluster (if I understood her correctly), and they probably don’t need to be removed unless they bother me (which they mostly don’t). Otherwise she said I should come back in a year and she can take another look and see if any of my various mole-like blemishes have gotten any bigger. And she said to remember to put on sunscreen.

So it took longer to drive to and from the appointment than it did to actually get checked out.

In other health news, my cold is still lingering – I’ve still got the sniffles and the occasional cough. I feel better every day, but it seems like every year it takes a little longer to shake the last of my colds. It may mean I have some low-grade allergies, since ’tis the season out here in California. Debbi’s been hit much harder with this cold, with nasty coughing jags, but she’s gradually getting better, too.

No, I don’t think either of us have the swine flu, since we both showed symptoms before it hit the media (and well before any confirmed US cases). Plus, it just wasn’t as debilitating as actual flu is supposed to be. (Have I ever had actual influenza? I can’t recall.) And there was a bug going around my office just before I caught it. So I think we just have colds. Annoying.

But better than swine flu.

My pinched nerve is mostly better, but sometimes I still get a pain in my arm. I’m hoping it will eventually go away entirely, but if it doesn’t, I wonder at what point I should call my doctor and ask whether we should do something else to try to treat it.

I’m so ready to just be healthy again.

I’ve come down with another cold. Seems like I’ve been sick a lot this winter – and it’s not even winter anymore! This one hasn’t been too bad, but it has sapped my energy towards the end of the day, and I’ve been sleeping quite heavily. I’ll still be glad when it’s over. Maybe by tomorrow, since it came down on me on Thursday.

Speaking of winter, while it’s been cool recently, that’s all supposed to be coming to an end today: The forecast high for our area is close to 90°, and it may be warmer tomorrow. By Wednesday it’s supposed to get back to normal, but it’ll be hot for a few days.

So I’ve been laying low recently, trying to get over the cold. I didn’t actually stay home from work on Friday, although in retrospect I probably should have. But I always feel guilty calling in sick unless I feel really sick. Plus, I’ve been extremely productive at work recently, getting through a big stack of bug reports, and then pulling bugs off of other people and getting through those. So at least I have something to show for it.

We also helped out with Camille’s baby shower yesterday, which went over really well, it seemed. Susan and Subrata hosted it (Chad & Camille hosted Susan’s shower last year), and many of our friends-in-common attended. My energy unfortunately ran down later in the afternoon, but it was a fun time anyway.

But I’m glad that the hectic activity of the last couple of weeks has wound down, and things will be getting back to normal for a while. And if I can shake this cold, then I can actually enjoy it.

I haven’t had much time to update recently. A lot of this is because it’s been insanely busy at work recently, and like (I imagine) many people I scribble down things for journal entries during slow times at work. But if there aren’t any slow times, well, you get the picture.

But I’m plenty busy out of work, too. For instance:

• I had frisbee last night. And next Thursday. And then our final tournament on Easter Sunday. And that’ll be it for the season.
• I’m still playing Magic Monday nights.
• It turns out there’s a regular Tuesday night poker game near my house. I went by this week, but only one other person showed up, so it was cancelled. But not before I walked over.
• I’ve been going over my taxes from my CPA. Every year I find something that confuses me, so this always takes longer than I think it should. I have yet to find an actual error in her work, though!
• Our homeowners association is looking at treating our buildings for termites. I’m mostly staying out of it, but I still read the updates. This is going to be a real pain in the ass if we tent our building, mainly in that we’ll have to figure out what to do with the cats for several days. Ideally we can stay in a pet-friendly hotel, but we’ll see.
• My friend Karen is visiting this weekend, for her birthday, so we’ll likely be all around the Bay Area over two days. This also means we’ve been cleaning a lot this week, especially to cut down on the cat dander.
• Next weekend is our fantasy baseball draft, so I’ve been preparing for that, which is a time sink. (Keeper lists are due tomorrow.)
• I’ve been doing some weeding and tree-trimming in the back yard, in advance of all the spring greenery coming in.
• I still need to order tickets to the Red Sox/A’s games, which are the week after Easter.

It’s hard to wedge journal entries into all of that. But after the Sox games, life should go back to normal, I think. (Well, until we tent for termites.)

I think my pinched nerve is slowly getting better. Yesterday was the first day in quite a while when I didn’t notice any pain in my arm (until I played frisbee, which aggravated it). I take that as a good sign. But it’s still not all better, as I do get the bicep soreness regularly, and the hand tingling occasionally. So I suspect it will be a while yet. The doctor didn’t say how long I should wait if it doesn’t go completely away before I contact him again. But hopefully it won’t be an issue, and it will in fact heal over the next few weeks.

I’m still grateful that it’s merely annoying and not impairing; it could have been so much worse.

My physical exam was pretty routine. I still need to lose weight, so I’m trying to cut back my eating a bit (which is all it takes, really, given time). I need to make an appointment to see a dermatologist, since I have a few odd marks on my skin. My doctor said none of them look alarming to him, but he thought it’s worth my getting checked out by an expert just to be safe.

So that’s what’s going on. I may update only sporadically for a couple of weeks, but I’ll be back!

Today’s Life Lesson is: When buying a new suit, it pays to go at 10 am on a Saturday morning in a down economy.

Seriously: We pretty much had the whole store to ourselves! A couple of random people wandered in after we were there for half an hour, but otherwise the whole staff was helping us out.

Men’s Wearhouse is having a sale on, well, nearly everything, so I bought up two suits (“buy one get one free”) which I’ll pick up once they’re adjusted. They also laid out six different shirt-and-tie combinations for us to look at with the suits, and I bought four of them (blue, red, lavender, and white shirts, to go with the black and gray suits). Certainly they’re more interesting than the usual white-shirt-laid-back-tie combinations I usually wear.

I would say it makes me feel all grown up, but honestly I think I only ever wear suits for weddings and occasional formal events. Which these days means once, maybe twice a year. I won’t wear them to work because, first, I don’t need to, and second, people would just ask me who I’m interviewing with.

Still, I needed the suits, because my old one – which must be 15 years old now – is on it last legs and needed to be replaced, since we have a wedding to go to in May. So, mission accomplished!

I’m on my fourth day of drugs for the pinched nerve in my neck. The drug in question, in case you’re wondering, is methylprednisolone. My doctor told me (to paraphrase) that the intent is to reduce any inflammation around the point where the nerve is impinged so that it will hopefully get back to its proper place.

He didn’t really give me a timeline for when I could hope to start feeling better. The 6-day drug plan starts with 6 pills on the first day, and then 1 fewer pill each day until I take 1 pill on the sixth and final day. He also told me that the pills could make me grouchy and might also interfere with my sleep. Plus, they could upset my stomach, so I shouldn’t take other drugs that could upset my stomach (such as ibuprofen) while I’m taking them.

The drugs haven’t done squat to my sleep. If anything, I’ve been sleepier than usual and have been fully sacked out at night as much as I ever am. My tummy does sometimes feel a tad queasy, but only a little bit. And as for being grouchy, well, maybe that’s because I’m in pain from this frickin’ pinched nerve in my neck!

Am I getting better? It’s hard to tell. Once I learned that tilting my head back would pinch the nerve and I could feel it down my arm, I tried not to do that so much. This means I’m not often leaning back or looking up. Is that good? Well, my arm has generally felt much better than it did on Friday, probably as a result of that. But is working around an injury really the best way to deal with the injury? I’ve had a mild pain in the back of my neck for a few days, and I suspect it’s because I’ve been restricting the motion of my head, and this stressing muscles that are now getting used a lot more than they usually are. A cascade injury, as the sports injury analysts like to call them.

(It’s amazing what I’ve learned about injuries as a result of following baseball closely. A cow-orker of mine recently tore his MCL, and I was able to explain to him in some detail what that meant.)

I also can hear a mild clicking in my neck when I turn my head from left to right. I suspect this is related to the injury – it might even be bone-on-bone grinding at the point where the ‘jelly’ between the vertebra has been displaced, and thus where the nerve is impinged. But I’m not really sure. It sounds higher on my spine than where the nerve is supposedly impinged, but my hearing isn’t precise enough to tell. I’ll certainly mention it to the doctor when next I see him.

Two things I try to keep in mind are the unreliability of my observations, and the fact that I’m not a trained doctor. I’m a moderately-educated layman. And even if I’m more objective about my observations of my self than some people, I don’t really trust that I’m being truly objective. So I’m mostly hoping things are better than they seem, and trying not to fear that they’re worse than they seem.

(The fear is the worst part. Last week I worried that I had a blood clot and might lose the user of my arm. That’s what motivated me to go see the doctor, even though I knew it was more likely to be a pinched nerve. Now I worry that I may only be able to fix the nerve through surgery, and who knows what that might involve. But mostly I’m trying not to worry about it too much. Trying.)

Yesterday was hard. My first day at work after a weekend of trying to relax my body. And I had a full slate of stuff to work on. By the end of the day my arm was sore and I was feeling exhausted. I went to play Magic in the evening anyway, and I was completely wiped out by the time I came home. This morning was also hard, and I was getting depressed that things don’t seem to be getting better.

This afternoon I’m feeling a little better, though. My arm doesn’t feel as sore as it did at the same time yesterday, and my neck isn’t as sore as it was during my post-lunch walk. It might all be in my head, but mostly I’m just glad it’s starting to feel better.

I hope it keeps feeling better, because as you saw if you follow me on Twitter or Facebook, I’m pretty freaking tired of this.

(And yes, I know this is small potatoes next to spinal problems many people have. That doesn’t make me any less tired of it.)

Two more days of drugs, and then a week and a half before my return to the doctor (which will be for a full physical, not just a follow-up. Ah, the joy of turning 40; I bet I have prostate exams in my future). I’d love it if this is completely cleared up by then.

I went to the doctor this afternoon about my arm.

A little over a week ago I got a pain in my neck. Nothing very unusual – I’ve gotten a stiff or sore neck once in a while dating back to high school. It always goes away in a few days at most.

This time it didn’t go away: The soreness seemed to spread down my right shoulder into my arm. By late this week it had settled into my upper arm, and I was getting occasional tingling down my arm, especially in my hand. It was uncomfortable to hold my arm in some positions, especially one I put it in when I sleep.

Today, with it not really getting any better, I called the doctor, and fortunately my regular doctor (okay, I’ve seen him once in eight years, but it’s the same one!) had an appointment open this afternoon.

After some tests, it turns out I have an impinged (pinched) nerve in my neck. This is what I figured it probably was, but I wanted to make sure it wasn’t, say, a circulatory problem, which probably would have been a lot worse. The treatment is a round of anti-inflammatory drugs to hopefully let the nerve get back into place, and then to see if it comes back after a week. So I picked up the drugs (I start tomorrow) and I’ll make an appointment for two weeks from now. Hopefully, it will all go as planned. (Plus, it will be a full physical, which I haven’t had in quite a while.) I also learned that I can feel it in my arm when I tilt my head back, so I’m going to try to do less of that for a bit (which may be a good trick as we’re going to see Watchmen tomorrow).

I really like my doctor, he’s quite funny, and also a good communicator. I’d been considering switching my PCP to a new building closer to both home and work, but I’m going to stick with him. It’s important to have a doctor you like, I think.

One other thing: The clinic, the Palo Alto Medical Foundation, uses software from my previous employer, Epic Systems. It was interesting to get a glimpse of how the software has evolved since I worked there, and also to see it in action. A little blast from the past, you might say.