After finally getting a chance to see my physical therapist today (had to schedule the appointment a few weeks out), I now have an answer about my shoulder problems. Yes. Two problems because I can never just have A problem. No, I have two. A pinched nerve in my neck and some pressure on some of the nerves between my neck and my shoulder. This has, unfortunately, created a situation where I have almost no comfortable positions to put my arm, since I’m dealing with two different sets of symptoms that thankfully don’t have too many conflicting treatment options. I’ve got my new stretches, know what to not do, and have a couple more interventions to intoduce into my day-to-day that will hopefully give me the relief I need to recover from these problems. Especially since now I know why my shoulder would start hurting more over the weekend and how to prevent it in the future. All I gotta do is deal with what will hopefully be the last day of pain (all of the poking, prodding, and stretching I did during my appointment has left my shoulder and neck in rough shape) and then avoid aggravating it too much for a week. Unless the problem is worse than my physical therapist thinks, that should be all I need to get some relief and my next appointment will be a quick check-in before I’m once again cleared to get back to my daily life (with a few new daily interventions to prevent this problem from coming back again in the future).

If that’s all it is going to take, I think I can handle one last rough day and night. I’d love to get this particular problem sorted out so I can go back to focusing on my noticeably-dimished withdrawal symptoms and figuring out if I need to make more changes to my mental health medications (which I’m 99% certain I need to do, but I’m too tired and uncomfortable to really focus on much of anything right now). And the cardboard cut I got on my hand while tidying up last night in preparation for my friend to hold down my apartment while I was at my physical therapy appointment (I needed someone around since the scheduled delivery of my Switch 2 overlapped with my PT appointment and I couldn’t miss my appointment or stand to think of my Switch 2 sitting on the stoop outside my apartment where any opportunistic thieves might be able to easily abscond with it on this, the day of the Switch 2’s release). It’s not horrible, but it is right in the crease of where my tumb meets my hand, so it’s constantly getting pulled at or prodded. I’ve got a lot of discomfort going on right now and while the shoulder stuff is definitely enough to completely capture my attention while I’m at work, I’m hopeful that I’ll be able to start ignoring it when I get home.

All of this pain and these bodily issues are really grating on me. It’s a lot to have going on all at once and I’m so incredibly tired that I feel like laying face-down on the floor of my office and having a cry about it all. I’m incredibly overwrought at this point, between the pain/discomfort and how ragged I’ve run myself this week, so I feel like any hour I get through without a mental break down is victory worth celebrating, especially because a bunch of my webcomics are on hiatus right now and I’ve got no little fun comics to read to distract me during my breaks at work. All I’ve got right now is writing another paragraph of a blog post and, while I’m still deeply committed to (and conflicted about) continuing my regular update schedule, that’s barely enough to hold my attention when the working of my hands, wrists, and fingers is pulling at the muscles and nerves in my neck that’s causing me pain since I can’t get my arm properly propped up at my standing desk or sitting in my chair. Especially when I know that doing anything that feels like it will alleviate the pain and tension will probably just make it worse, based on talking to my physical therapist and my experiences with this pain over the last few weeks. It’s awful and it’s all I can really think about, especially since unfocusing my mind enough to ignore the pain also makes me start to doze off, which is not an acceptable use of my little breaks at work.

It is difficult, sometimes, to remember what it felt like to not be constantly exhausted or in pain. I’ve gotten brief glimmers of that this week, little reminders of what it’s like to feel fine, but it has been such a long time since I consistently felt like that for even an hour, let alone multiple days. Every time I think I’m getting closer, something new crops up to make my life more difficult again or to add some extra layer of complication or a new source of pain or fatigue. If I could shut down for a couple weeks and just rest, I would. I am so worn down by all of this that sometimes I don’t even notice the pain and exhaustion I feel until I am mercifully free of it for a moment. Then it all comes crashing back down and I’m left to grapple with my discomfort and the uncertain possibility of future relief. It’s enough to make me serisouly regret the changes I tried to make in my life that prompted all of this discomfort and pain. I’m not sure that it was all worth it, as I slowly approach the two-year mark. I don’t know that I’ve gained more than I lost. I, of course, had no way of knowing what these past twenty-one months would cost me before the price came due. There’s no way I could have anticipated such severe reactions to every medication I’ve tried in that period, especially given how I’ve generally just shrugged off almost every single medication side effect prior this period of twenty months (I told my doctor early into this whole process that I usually get over whatever side effects happen within a couple days of starting a medication and then immediately ran straight into a whole bunch of exceptions). And yet here I am, twenty months older and feeling worse about my body than I ever have in my entire life. You try to fix one thing and the whole ramshackle stack comes tumbling down…