a cute toaster

Continuing the theme of lyrics as post titles…heh.

I don’t dance. And when I do, I shouldn’t. I’m a terrible dancer. I’m the epitome of a white girl when it comes to moving my body. It just doesn’t flow. It doesn’t matter if I’m drunk or sober.

I’ve always been accident-prone. When I was taking psychology classes in university, we took a test to score ourselves on the different types of intelligence (linguistic, logical-mathematical, musical, bodily-kinetic, interpersonal, spacial, intrapersonal ). I scored very low in bodily-kinetic intelligence. My professor theorized that I’m so clumsy because I don’t have a good ability to tell where I am in relation to other objects.

I scored highest on interpersonal and intrapersonal as I recall, which is counter-intuitive but hey; that’s me.

I’ve suspected for a long time that I have a mind-body disconnect. The things I like to do aren’t physical other than riding a motorcycle which is a mix of physical and mental. I know that I’ve always been clumsy; some of my earliest memories are of falling over or being hurt, but I wonder how much the pain I have in my body on a near-constant basis has to do with it? Did I separate myself from my body because of the pain, or am I painful because I’m separated?

Now that I’ve been having this work done on my body to alleviate the pain I wonder if I could have dealt with the issues before they got this bad if I had been paying better attention.

I don’t tend to pay attention to my body unless there’s something wrong with it. It gets me from point A to B, it doesn’t like the sun, I feed it when it’s hungry…but sometimes I have a hard time recognizing it as me. Now that I say it, if sounds really weird – but there you go.

Today I started combined massage therapy and trigger point treatment. I knew that it wasn’t going to be shiatsu, but ow.

And oh hey! We discovered that I have a major problem with my right hip! There are massive trigger points for both of my hips, and she found that they’re tilted funny, but it seems my right side has been overcompensating for my left (which I discovered was messed up when I started physiotherapy for my knee) but until my massage therapist started her assessment I had no idea I had trigger points there. And bloody hell, they’re  really painful; although none of them are any less than ohfuckthatreallyhurtsalotohmygodmakeitstop painful.

As warned, my neck and head feel a little worse now. I have new stretches to do at home and my book came in the mail yesterday. The good news is that Katie (my massage therapist, who is the daughter of my doctor. How cool is that?) says my trigger points seem to respond well.

I go for another two treatments next week, and then we shall play it be ear.

Back to the doctor’s today to see what else can be done for my headaches (that are not migraines we’ve discovered). The problem has been traced to trigger points in my neck and throat.

I had an incomplete understanding of trigger points before today: I knew about fibromyalgia tender points and thought they were one and the same, since trigger point and tender point are (incorrectly) used interchangeably sometimes.

Diagram of tender points for fibromyalgia diagnostic purposes

Tender points are the painful spots most widely used to diagnose fibromyalgia. In order to have a diagnosis, a patient must have 11 of 18 tender points positive for pain when pressed with enough pressure to turn your thumbnail white.

The important part of these tender points is that the pain is local; it isn’t referred to a distant point. These spots are chronically painful and difficult to get rid of.

An example of trigger points

Trigger points are acute (although may of them can be in place for years, and there are latent, secondary, and satellite trigger points ) areas of pain that cause referred pain to other areas and/or an involuntary muscle twitch when they’re pressed. The interesting thing is that they’re not considered a part of fibromyalgia, they’re from myofascial pain syndrome or chronic myofascial pain.

You can probably imagine how happy I was to get another new diagnosis, but chronic fatigue syndrome, fibromyalgia, and myofacial pain syndrome often occur together and each one can mimic the others, to come extent.

At any rate, my doctor isn’t as concerned about what I have. She wants to fix it.

She gave me some stretches to do and immediately I felt the pain and tension loosen and dissipate. It’s back now, but I know how to treat it. She also gave me a referral to a RMT who specializes in myofacial pain. I also have to get this book to do some treatments at home.

This explains a lot of things: my nagging headaches, the pain in my sinuses, my random sore throats: it’s all caused by a bunch of trigger points. If I can keep on top of the stretches and to the exercises in the book I’ve ordered, I should be on my way to living with a lot less pain.

I’ve been suffering from awful headaches for the past…well it’s been a long time…and my sleep schedule has gotten all out of whack. I’ve been working odd shifts (for me) to cover vacation. I don’t know if that’s what it is or not. I think it’s probably a contributing factor, but not the whole thing.

I feel restless; I’m bored but nothing can hold my attention. I want to go out, but I can’t find the energy to get ready or think of where I’d go. Everything is annoying to me, but I’m trying to sit on my hands and not be bitchy.

Generally I’m okay with living with some sort of constant pain all the time, but when this extra incessant pain is layered on top of it, it’s nearly unbearable. But I do bear it, because what’s the alternative?

In the cupboard there is some cyclobenzaprine with my name on it. I bet that if I take it now my mood will be considerably better tomorrow.