Today hurts a little, more
I woke up with a sudden pain in my left arm on a Saturday morning. I said to myself, oh I must have hurt myself at the soccer game the night before. So I did what most people do. Sleep it off.
Over the course of the next few weeks, the pain continued. Now, did I hurt a tendon, perhaps a nerve? Did I fracture somewhere? Looking for visible signs of bruises, contusions provided no feedback. So I did what most people do. Sleep it off.
The pain persisted. The strange thing was I could specifically locate the pain. I knew it was in my left arm.
I continued to live like this. My morning jogs now came with a constant pain on my left arm. And I told myself, what’s the worst that could happen? The body heals by itself.
This, continued several weeks. I felt pins and needles, followed by severe soreness, something did not make sense. On some occasions, I would use my tie to support my arm. But still I can’t locate the freaking pain, I was beginning to feel like it’s psychological. It’s now around 8 weeks since I felt that way, I’ve decided to finally seek treatment. I went two GPs, three times to ask for help. Both gave me painkillers and ask me to see how it goes. I would like to think painkillers would help, except that they made me drowsy and that made sleeping a little easier. When I’m conscious, I felt that the painkillers could work a little harder, even if it does give me a placebo effect I would be a little happier.
My trip to Thailand is dangerously close now, I’ve now decided that the modern medicine may not be the way, so I decided to look for a Traditional Chinese Medicine practitioner. Found him, I did, the physician said I had a built up of blood clot on my neck and shoulder region, he said he could use light bulb looking things to help me get rid of “bad blood”. Scary af, I decided to just do it. Well, it uses vaccuum and needle to clot and release the blood. Here’s how it looked like.
Guess what? (Cmon, this post is not a fairytale, so it did not work) but it did for that day. I was feeling better, it might be placebo, but I felt better. I went for my trip.
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Throughout trip, I was feeling the same sore, again. Omg, what the heck happened? Did the light bulbs not work? One Saturday morning, I woke up, with extreme difficult to articulate my left arm. I thought I have had a stroke. Would I lose everything? Movement, motor ability, speech, have I come till the end of the line? My life is over, I told myself.
That’s it, I decided to go to the GP, this time demanding to seek a specialist. And you know, the rest is history. Went to a specialist, told me he was suspecting something, got an MRI (which is a horrible experience for what I thought wasn’t going to be, but it’s a claustrophobic’s worst nightmare) talking about MRI and claustrophobia, here’s what they did for children which was pretty cool.
After I showed my specialist, it was sure that I’ve got cervical spondylosis. A what? Yeah. It usually happens to old people. Now my body is degenerating at a crazy rate. So wtf is cervical spondylosis? Apparently, due to degenerative tissues have caused a strain on both the left and right side of my body.
I was recommended 3 things. Take medication which the symptoms should go away (it didn’t), surgery (which in the doc’s words, he is not confident to operate because of a high risk of paralysis) and physiotherapy.
I recently stopped physiotherapy, I wasn’t happy to just convince myself that it’s going to work. Because I don’t think it would.
Occasionally I would search online for people my age who has this condition but the scarcity of such resources have depleted my faith to find some one or some group, I guess I’m seeking for a support group.
At the point of writing, I’m am in pain. In fact, there is not a single point in time where I don’t experience pain, sore or numbness.
I still believe that everything happens for a reason, and even this condition will have find its purpose.
But today it hurts a little, more.
