Well, after pushing my limits as far as I could pretty much every work day for two weeks, my physical testing is one day from being done (well, for now. No testing is ever truly “done” and there’ll be more physical testing coming as soon as new parts show up and I’ve got so much software testing that needs doing that I’m starting to think about working on future weekends) and I am exhausted. My arms are sore, my hands are stiff, my forearm muscles have gotten much larger than I ever expected them to be, and I’m ready for another weekend of rest. And maybe another few days past the weekend. I wouldn’t mind some more time for my hands to recover, for my muscles to rest, and for my joints to get some relief. Even keeping my goals modest by sticking to fifty test cycles a day rather than aiming for my previous target of one hundred, the toll this work has taken on my body is considerable. My physical therapist, though, thinks it’s all a good thing since my problems seem to all be muscular now and that I’m as generally resilient as I am about it. I feel better each morning. I’m capable of moving in ways I couldn’t when I was on those medications. I actually got up from a laying-down position using core strength alone and It’s been a good nine months since I even attempted that. I just, you know, ache from repeating the same strenuous activity fifty times a day every day, on top of all my other laborious work. Normal stuff. Anyone else would ache as much, if not more than I do.

Still, it’s not great when my hands are sometimes so stiff in the morning that I’ve got to stretch them out just so I can even get them closed. The muscles in my forearms and hands are so tight that my tendons and nerves are struggling. At least on my right arm. On my left, it’s difficult to tell what’s strain and muscle stuff and what’s the lingering effects of my burns, which are mostly scars at this point, except for the worst parts, which are still losing the last few layers of dead skin. I’ve still got at least one entirely numb patch of skin on my left pinky and the other burn spots are now too callused to tell if they’ve still got feeling or if the feeling is just from the whole callus shifting whenever I touch it. Not to mention all the new calluses that don’t feel anything near the spots I burned that are either also dead patches or just thick calluses from two weeks of work. As well as I’m doing, I’m not completely better yet and, at this rate, these problems will likely linger past the point where the medications I was taking are entirely out of my system. After all, it’s not like that period of time represents my recovery from the damage the medications did, just the time when they’ll no longer be actively making me worse. I’ll take what I can get, of course, but I’m really looking forward to feeling (hopefully) fully better some day. I’d really like to be able to sleep and play video games and write without having to stretch and reorient my arms constantly because my hands keep starting to fall asleep/go tingly-numb.

For now, though, I still believe I’ll keep improving. Even exhausted and worn out, I’m still feeling so much better than I did last month. I actually feel better after sleeping, rather than some different flavor of the same kind of bad. I also can’t handle dairy anymore, but that’s also pretty normal for me. I really wasn’t expecting “can now handle dairy without normal lactose intolerance issues” to be a side-effect of the medications I was on, but the year of being dairy-problem free as I’ve consumed my beloved dairy products has come to an end and now every meal including dairy is the same old gamble it once was. I miss being able to eat pizza without a concern, but I’m still willing to accept that I have to tread carefully when it comes to my dairy intake now. Which. you know, was a thing I always did. I didn’t even realize this change was happening until this month when I overplayed my hand and had a little too much dairy, thereby making me realize how long it had been since the last time that had happened, so it’s not like I’ve lost anything.

Anyway. I’m going to do one last day of testing, take a weekend to rest, and then hopefully be able to do a lesser, more-healthy amount of laborious testing in the future. Now that the big set of tests is done, I shouldn’t need to repeat it for a while and, even then, it won’t be on the same timeline, so even if I did have to re-do it, I’d be able to take my time. I’ll probably continue to do some of that testing, just to keep my muscles in-use and to help stretch them out a bit (and, you know, as a part of a decent day’s workout), but I plan to take it very easily for at least a little bit beyond this weekend. I need the rest and recovery time, but I also have plenty of other work to do that doesn’t require that kind of laborious effort. Maybe too much. This past two weeks of work has been more all-consuming that I thought it would be and some of the stuff around my testing that I hoped would happen quickly has not, in fact, happened quickly. Time is growing short and the pressure is on! Just, you know, mostly mental pressure now, what with all this physical work completed.