The good and the bad
So we finally got our government check yesterday. Yay! Which means we now have a nice safety-net and may eventually buy a coffee table and some sort of electronics/TV storage piece for the living room and we can save up a little and start looking into a some noise-reduction method for the apt. The noise isn't terrible but its hard to try to relax and/or concentrate when you hear someone else's TV 18 hours out of the day or hear people on the phone when you are trying to have a romantic dinner with your husband or trying to have some other romance with your husband.
The bad news is I think my pinched nerve took a nasty turn for the worse. It started last week after I carried a lot of things home from the store (instead of using my old lady cart) because I was stopping in after work for some groceries and things. Later that evening the fingers in my left hand throbbed and ached in manner that I imagine arthritis to be like. Making dinner that night really sucked because I had some difficulty holding things. My fingers still hurt the next day but it seemed a little better and the motor-function of my fingers was go so I let it go thinking in a few days things would be back to normal.
Normal they are not. I still have pain but not as bad, but it now feels more like frostbite in the tips of several of the fingers. I've got an appointment with a neurologist (which are pretty damn hard to get apparently) on the 14th. If something opens up I may get in sooner. I'm pretty sure I will have to have some kind of nerve-block/cortizone injection as a first step, which also probably means I will probably have to have another MRI (with contrast) first. I hate injections-I hate them. The injections into my hip joint that I had last year helped quite a bit but man did they suck. I'm way freaked out about an injection near/in my spine, which is why I didn't have it done when the nerve was pinched originally. Although I am a little hopeful that this could mean I won't have any more pain or that the pain will be less. Its been over four years now and the daily pain while not as extreme as it once was has definitely taken a toll.
The bad news is I think my pinched nerve took a nasty turn for the worse. It started last week after I carried a lot of things home from the store (instead of using my old lady cart) because I was stopping in after work for some groceries and things. Later that evening the fingers in my left hand throbbed and ached in manner that I imagine arthritis to be like. Making dinner that night really sucked because I had some difficulty holding things. My fingers still hurt the next day but it seemed a little better and the motor-function of my fingers was go so I let it go thinking in a few days things would be back to normal.
Normal they are not. I still have pain but not as bad, but it now feels more like frostbite in the tips of several of the fingers. I've got an appointment with a neurologist (which are pretty damn hard to get apparently) on the 14th. If something opens up I may get in sooner. I'm pretty sure I will have to have some kind of nerve-block/cortizone injection as a first step, which also probably means I will probably have to have another MRI (with contrast) first. I hate injections-I hate them. The injections into my hip joint that I had last year helped quite a bit but man did they suck. I'm way freaked out about an injection near/in my spine, which is why I didn't have it done when the nerve was pinched originally. Although I am a little hopeful that this could mean I won't have any more pain or that the pain will be less. Its been over four years now and the daily pain while not as extreme as it once was has definitely taken a toll.