It hurts when I do this...

After hobbling around with random searing pain all weekend, I was finally able to call the surgeon today.  The weird thing about this pain is, there doesn't seem to be any particular trigger for it.  As I mentioned in yesterday's blog, the pain just shoots right across my incision from the nutectomy.  It is a very sharp, nearly crippling pain.  There is no rhyme or reason to when it hits, but it mainly hits when my torso changes in relation to my right thigh. Sometimes it hits when walking upstairs, which I kind of expect since there is a lot of exertion and motion to walk upstairs.  But it will happen at random times, like making a sandwich yesterday when I turned to reach something.  Today, I was a little apprehensive about taking a shower, because it is so random and at times it makes you want to drop to your knees.  If I drop to my knees in the shower, I bang my head on the tub, then I lie in a pool of my own blood, and when the ambulance arrives they will ask if I am supposed to have two nuts or if the accident caused one to disappear.  Luckily none of that happened.  Stepping over the tub, bending over to wash, even drying off all happened without incident.  I manage to get my boxers and pants on doing what looks like a double dutch jump roping contest in extreme slow motion.  Thinking I am in the clear, I slide my shirt over my head, and at the point where my arms are in the air and all I can see is sweatshirt, it hits.  I fall back onto the sink in pain, one arm still waving helplessly in the air, trapped by the half put on shirt.  I do that thing you do when you want to scream out very bad words, but you know you shouldn't scream or say the bad word, so you kind of "whisper scream".  I think mine turned out to be a little more scream than whisper, because I walk out of the bathroom and get the Was-There-A-Good-Reason-You-Just-Said-The-F-Word look.  There was, because it really F-ing hurt!

The whole day was crazy.  Besides the shooting pain while walking upstairs and putting on a shirt, it happened, walking across the floor, bending over to pet a basenji, coughing, reaching for the phone, and other random, non-stressful things.  It wouldn't bother me as much if I knew what was causing it.  As the old joke goes, a guy tells his doctor that "It hurts when I do this", and the doc says "Don't do that."  I don't know what the "that" is that I should quit doing.  All I know is it's extremely painful and has almost resulted in the tragedy of spilled Pepsi and whisper screamed profanities several times.  Luckily, there has usually been something nearby I can grab for balance when it happens, and I have always had my clothes on.

I call the doctor, well not the doctor the nurse, who wasn't in so I have to leave a message, and tell them what is going on.  She calls back to ask a few more questions before she calls my surgeon, and I make sure to say I don't want painkillers.  You hear all of the stories of people hooked on prescription painkillers that call doctors and make stuff up just for the meds, that you feel like you have to justify any call to a doctor about pain.  I told her that I do NOT want painkillers (although they would probably feel pretty good).  She calls back and the doctor says it sounds like it is just a strain in the incision area and to ice it down twice a day.  The ice is almost as painful as the pain itself.  It wasn't that bad just after my surgery.  Oh, that's right, I was on painkillers then!  Why did I tell the nurse I didn't want painkillers?

There is another pain that has started since this random pain began, and that is a pain the feels almost like a pulled groin on the opposite side of where all the medical twisting, pulling, and slicing happened.  Normally I would be more alarmed by that, but I think that pain has developed because of the other pain.  They aren't really related in any way.  But ever since I associated the searing random pain with bending my waist on the right side, I have been trying to walk, go upstairs, sit down, roll over, and fetch while keeping the right half of my body completely rigid.  This results in me walking around the house like I am constantly trying to mount a horse while lassoing a calf, swinging the right side of my body wildly and perfectly straight, while my left arm makes giant circle motions for balance.  As a result, weird muscles that I didn't know I had feel like they have been through an old fashioned taffy puller, because I don't normally spend hours at a time trying to mount a horse, and I imagine if I ever did, I would switch up and try to mount the horse from the other side occasionally.

So here I am, back to the same place I was three weeks ago.  Walking around the house hunched over and dragging, like I am Quasimodo and Igor's crippled love child.  And I am back to sitting around the house either playing on the computer or watching TV and switching the channel every time that stupid guy from the State Farm commercials comes on, which has me switching the channel so much I have to mount, drag, mount, drag, mount, drag my way over to get fresh remote control batteries every few hours.  C'mon State Farm, at least Geico mixes it up a little bit with a little caveman here, a little gecko there, and random stacks of googly eyed money!  I guess I should just be thankful that we have cable, and I can choose between 600 channels and that only three of them show Maury.  And if I keep walking like this, I should be able to do a dead on Roy Rogers impression.  Now I just need to train one of the basenjis to answer to "Trigger".