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[felicula]

That tightly wound muscle in the right bottom of the back of my neck still won't loosen. With each night's sleep, I wake up with it more tightly strung and painful. At the moment I'm drugged to the teeth trying to cut through the pain cycle so the muscle will get back to normal. The arnica gel stopped working the day before yesterday.

I hate being drugged, but not being able to lift even the milk jug without pain is a problem. Here's hoping this works. I don't trust my doctor. He's not even worth the $20 copay. He doesn't give a shit whether I actually feel better or not. He's more interested in getting the bare minimum done for the insurance company.

I know it's not as if I just woke up and doctors were no longer held accountable to their patients. It's been a gradual process. Now it seems the only folks doctors are accountable to are the insurance companies... That's just not right.

At least I know what has been done in the past to help what I've got. My back / neck muscles have liked to seize up like this since early 1995. Holy fuck, that's almost a decade... Anyhow, the pattern is: cut through the pain cycle so the thing will move, then stretches and exercises can do their job. Until I can move properly, though, it does more harm than good to stretch, and in the meantime I get ucky-loopy.

So much for having a nice, productive, Aidan-free week...

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[blackfelicula.livejournal.com]

In the past, doctors have started off with something like a big-ass shot of demerol, and followed it up with hydrocodone and PT. Those were for worse cases than this, though. That was when I had to get unstuck from a position. I don't let them give me the cyclobenzaprine that they usually give for this kinda thing, though. It messes my head up much more than it helps. I'm thinking of trying to nix the hydrocodone too... On the downswing it kills my stomach. An hour or two of feeling better is not worth the half a day worth of stomach upsets after.

Today's coctail was actually a combination of two acetaminophen (500 mg each), three aleve (220 mg each) and one tylenol 3 with codeine (amounts in the pill not included in the prescription information). I could have used a hydrocodone instead of the tylenol 3, but that tends to have more negative side effects for me. When I self-medicate this is the "high power" combo that has helped in the past. The downside to meds is that I have an insanely high tolerance for many things, partly due to my size. I also had... a bad habit or several when I was in high school.

mechanchaos has been massaging the area with arnica gel nightly since Saturday. I've been drinking a decent amount of water as much to keep cool on the hot days as to help circulate the uckies.

To be honest, yesterday I had a marathon session of masturbation as well.

I wish I had the financial resources to get professional massage or something. I'm considering calling the chiropractor that kolys mentioned below, at least to find out whether they could help and whether we could afford it.

I'm likely going to go to my doctor tomorrow anyway, just to cover that angle of things. Tonight I'm going to try sleeping my son's bed, which is in much better condition than my own. That could at least help narrow things down between whether it's our bed or how I sleep that exacerbates the problem.

***crosses her fingers and hopes for the best***