So, I’m most of the way through my first week back in the office after my vacation and had my first physical therapy appointment since I started feeling better. While I’m definitely feeling a little strain from being back at work and being physically active again for the first time in a couple weeks, I had a remarkably different experience during my physical therapy appointment. Not only did I do enormously better on all the physical assessments than I did in my last appointment (a month ago), my therapist was so positive about my recovery that we put aside all the stuff we’d been working on in past appointments to address another problem I’ve had on and off for years. It was great to feel like things were finally working out for me after spending so much time in pain and feeling like I just wasn’t making any progress. I will probably go back to doing some kind of exercises once my recovery from that medication I was taking is finished, but it will probably be much more focused on taking care of my body and building good workout habits than on trying to fix my back. The more time that passes, the more it seems like that problem was tied directly to the side effects of the medication I was on and less on swapping mattresses. I mean, swapping mattresses was definitely a part of the issue, but I think that I’d have gotten through that relatively quickly on my own if I hadn’t been taking the joint and muscle pain and stiffness suite of medications. In retrospect, it feels almost kind of silly to think about how worried I was that all that pain and discomfort was a permanent problem.

That said, I’m not entirely out of the woods yet. I’ve got another few weeks to go before the medication is entirely out of my system and while I’ve made plenty of gains, I know I need to continue to be careful about my limits as I slowly get back into not just my old level of physical activity, but the level of physical activity I know I’m going to need over the next couple of months. I’m still avoiding specifics about my work project, because of both the NDA and my desire to avoid letting my blog ever point to my workplace, but I need to run one thousand test cycles on this almost-final version of the product and that’s moderate to heavy labor with each test. It is going to take a lot out of me, even if I manage to convince my coworkers to help me out. After all, I’m the one responsible for the project. Sure, it’s incredibly reasonable for me to ask them to help me out, but it is ultimately my responsibility and I am capable enough to not need to foist that labor off on other people. A month ago, I’d have had to have a conversation with my boss about my physical limits and who we could get to step in for some of this more rigorous testing (a conversation I actually already had with him, since I could see the demands on me starting to increase even as I felt my capability continue to falter), but now I am confident I can work my way up to the daily numbers I need to get all thousand test cycles finished in a timely manner.

So, with a pass from my physical therapist and encouragement to take my time easing back into the labor I’m doing, I’m all ready to start tomorrow (or last Friday as you’re reading this) with some heavy labor. We’ll see how my body holds up from all that and how I fare over the weekend after I push myself to do it, but it really does feel nice to know that I’m physically capable of putting in this effort for the first time in what feels like forever and is, in reality, the entire project’s lifetime. I started this project back in October of 2023 but didn’t get a physical unit to work with until April of 2024, at which point I was already struggling to keep myself functioning as the pain and stiffness I felt started wearing me down. This is the closest I’ve come to actually testing it while I’m at the top of my game and while I did plenty of work last Spring and Summer to keep myself functional enough to test it, I am absolutely certain that I can eventually doubled my previous daily testing records. Maybe even more. I’ve been doing a lot of work to keep myself capable of running these tests, after all. It’s not like that will go away as the side-effects of the medication I was on continue to dwindle and eventually disappear. Plus, in a few more weeks, when they’re completely gone, I’ll have weeks of this heavy labor behind me and I’ll be more capable than ever.

I know I only just wrote about this a few days ago, but it really is marvelous to not feel horrible all the time. I’m sure the next few weeks will be filled with stumbles, sore days, and the occasional complete miss when I’m aiming for my limits, but I don’t have to worry about paying for those for a week or more. I don’t have to count the days until my next week off since now I won’t need a full week without work to recover from physical exertion. I won’t need to keep limping along until I can scrape a few days off together such that I’m forced to take it easy for the remainder of the week. I can actually just rest on the weekends and maybe even still have the energy to do things like clean around my apartment or go out to visit people. I’m signed up for a board game event with some local friends and while I fully expect to need to cancel at the last minute (there’s more than enough of them to play without me), the fact that I’m even considering it speaks to just how well I’m doing. I wouldn’t have even considered it a month ago. Now I’m actually thinking about it and hoping to be able to go, regardless of what I think will actually happen (since I expect I’ll overshoot my limits tomorrow, on my first day back to heavy labor after my break, and who know what will happen after that). It really does just feel nice to feel “better.”