Wow, I Never Do That!

I am glad I got almost 10,000 words done in my new Big Lake book over the weekend because I needed to make some headway on it. I originally had hoped to have it done in December, but with all the running we had to do back and forth to the Mayo Clinic in Jacksonville prior to Terry’s surgery a week ago yesterday, I got way behind schedule. Even now, I’m only about a third of the way through the book and I still have a long way to go. Many readers have asked when it will be out, and all I can say is that it will be out as soon as I can finish it.

Meanwhile, my back has been killing me for the last few days and nothing has helped. Not my back brace, not medical marijuana oil, not my Voltaren (diclofenac) gel, not even pain pills. I can’t stand up straight and I’m back to needing a cane to get around.

After proofing and correcting the chapters I had written over the weekend I went to the chiropractor yesterday, then I came home and had lunch. Sometime around 2 PM I sat down in my recliner, planning to use my Sony ICD-PX440 digital voice recorder to knock out a couple more chapters.

But that didn’t happen. I fell asleep and did not open my eyes again until Terry woke me up about 6:30 for dinner. She kept checking on me and said I had not moved in all that time and it took her several tries to rouse me. Sometimes I will take a nap for an hour or so in the afternoon, but sleeping over four hours in the middle of the day? I never do that!

I’d like to say it that helped my back, but I would be lying. I texted my pain doctor yesterday and it looks like sometime right after the holidays I will be going in for radiofrequency ablation (RFA), a procedure that uses radio waves to stop the lumbar medial branch nerve from transmitting pain signals from the injured facet joint to the brain. This is not a cure-all, and quite frequently the nerve regenerates and the procedure has to be repeated, but some patients get many months or even years of relief in the meantime. Since I’m not a candidate for surgery and we’ve tried just about everything else, it’s worth giving it a try.

Several of you asked about how Terry is doing, and as I said above, she’s just over a week out of surgery for her Medtronics stimulator implant. She still has quite a bit of discomfort at the incision site, and if she moves wrong she is definitely aware of it, but everything seems to be progressing quite well and she says she definitely has seen a small reduction in her symptoms. From everything we have read, that should continue to improve over time.

Today being Christmas Eve, I hope that everybody is with people you love and having a wonderful time. I won’t do much of a blog tomorrow, if any, because you’ve all got better things to do than waste time with me on Christmas Day. Merry Christmas my friends.

Thought For The Day – For anybody else that’s getting coal for Christmas, maybe we can get together and fire up the grill or something.