The good: fall cleaning, chicken pie, and KILT!

First the good:

For the past few days I’ve been (I’d been? See next post) pretty productive around the house, cleaning and reorganizing.

My flowers are gorgeous.

I GOT MY BIRTHDAY KILT and it’s wonderful and perfect and exactly the length I wanted and it looks great on me! I’m so happy! Thanks so much to all of you who contributed, or wished you could. Pictures will eventually be forthcoming.

I had a lovely evening with plumtreeblossom; she made me yummy chicken pie (first time we’ve cooked in a while) and we ate it while watching Robots with vanguardcdk. And I got to briefly and unexpectedly see joyeous on my way over.

The bad: Weird hip problem

The bad is that I am in serious pain and can barely walk.

Saturday during the day I noticed a mild twinge in my left hip joint, the kind of thing I notice from time to time which normally goes away on its own in an hour or so. Saturday night I sat down at the computer for a couple of hours. When I got up, I was quite sore and limping. I have no idea what if anything actually happened to cause this; to my knowledge I didn’t do anything unusual. I had a hard time finding a position that worked for me to sleep in, but I found one (on my back, knees together and slightly bent on top of a pillow). When I woke up I felt a lot better and thought “Great! Maybe I’ll be over it.” Then I tried to get out of bed, though.

I was seriously hobbling yesterday, but able to make my way around. I bought myself a cane at the drugstore, on the theory that recently I’ve had two twisted ankles and a bad hip, and plumtreeblossom has had occasional minor knee and ankle trouble, and her mother visited and could really have used a cane while she was here, and it seemed like an investment with excellent returns. And I drove to plumtreeblossom’s instead of taking the T, despite the fact that that means I have to pay $20 for parking at work tomorrow, because I didn’t think I could handle the walk to and from the T station.

It’s a good thing I have that cane; I don’t know what I’d do without it.

I was mostly OK for my date with Mare, limping with the cane and occasionally in pain but functional. When we went to bed (around midnight) I tried to duplicate the position that had worked for me the previous night. I woke up once probably around 1:30 and had to get some Aleve. At 3:00 I woke up moaning and couldn’t stay in bed because I couldn’t find a position that didn’t hurt. Even with the cane, I couldn’t pick up my left leg to take a step and I couldn’t put any weight on it, so I had this funny shuffle where I’d scoot my good foot forward on the floor, balancing with the cane, and then slide my left leg along the floor. Sitting hurts a lot less than lying down, so plumtreeblossom set me up in the living room with my laptop. (I don’t normally carry that with me; it’s fortuitous that I had it with me today.) I’ve been sitting for an hour, and I’m feeling a lot better. With the cane I can take steps; even a few small steps without it. (I tested this just now by going to the kitchen for a cupcake and some water.) An hour ago I was debating whether I needed to go to the emergency room right away, but now (if I don’t get worse) I think I probably won’t even have to tomorrow.

This is weird. Nothing happened to cause this. It definitely feels like a joint thing; it feels like it’s right in the ball-and-socket joint (although I don’t know if that’s the sort of thing I can tell). It’s definitely not muscular. And although even small movements hurt, it seems like it’s very seriously aggravated by long periods of immobility (like my couple hours sitting at the computer or my three hours in bed tonight), and it seems like using the joint (however gently and gingerly) helps.

*Sigh.* I hope this is just a weird thing that goes away and doesn’t come back, and not the first discovery that I’m developing arthritis or something. The last thing I need is another major medical adventure to embark upon.

Anyway, I think I’m going to try sleeping in this chair shortly. I’m feeling a lot more comfortable now.

Sorry for bending your collective ear!

PS — The other bad is that the wireless here seems to be really sporadic. :-)

Current hip status

(Current hip status: beowabbit is currently very hip.)

Going to work was a really stupid idea. My theory was that if I’m going to be in pain and discomfort anyway, there’s no real advantage to not being at work for it. What I didn’t count on was it taking almost two hours for me to walk from the parking garage to my office building. (Admittedly, I’m counting the three times I sat down on benches.) That normally takes 10min if I stop to buy an apple and a coffee on the way.

However, the campus police were very kind and sent over a Safety Patrol van to get me back to the parking garage from my office when I left (early), and the drive back to Quincy was uneventful and less painful than the drive from plumtreeblossom’s to work had been.

On the way home, I stopped by the drugstore and got crutches. I’m not sure they’re an improvement over the cane. They’re better for standing still for long periods of time, and they’re much quicker, and they’re more stable, so there are fewer of the nasty surprises, but they are much clumsier to handle, harder to keep from falling when I set them aside because I can’t hook them on things (and bending over to pick anything up is not so much happening at the moment), and while the cane basically left me fine most of the time with occasional moments of serious pain when I stepped wrong or had to rebalance, the crutches basically hurt just a bit on each “step”. I think the crutches are probably net worse on my hip. If I feel like I can go out tomorrow, I may buy a second cane, and try the two-cane approach. (Assuming, of course, I’m not magically all better tomorrow.)

I left a message for my doctor’s office as soon as I got in to work today, but haven’t heard back yet. At this point, I don’t think it justifies an ER visit, because my best guess is that medical science is going to tell me to suck it up and wait, and in the meantime keep my weight off it and take lots of painkillers, which I am already doing. (Well, modulo the stupidity of trying to go in to work today, but I’ve learned my lesson. Thanks, plumtreeblossom; you were right. On the other hand, I got lots of sympathy from my co-workers.)

In other news, my flowers are still beautiful, and my kilt still makes me very very happy.