Blue-Footed Musings

I saw the shoulder doctor again recently. As expected, she now wants me to get an MRI. There has been a delay in scheduling it, though, because my health insurance needed to approve it first, an extra step that really pissed me off. My old insurance didn’t require preapproval. I’d just get whatever procedures I needed and they paid for it (or didn’t, as was usually the case, because of my giant deductible). How outrageous it is that my health insurance is now making these decisions, not me and my doctor. But hey, that’s the way of things lately. Bit by bit our control over our lives, our spending, our health, even our very own bodies, is taken from us.

A few days after my appointment, I received an e-mail from my insurance. My request for an MRI had been approved. And also denied. It was confusing until I read through all the nonsense. What they’d approved was the place where I wanted to get the MRI done, which was not, incidentally, where my doctor wanted me to get it done (she wanted to send me to the hospital where I’d been charged more than $3,000 for a cortisone shot. No thanks!).

But the insurance had denied my request for the MRI itself. They’d based their denial on the crazy notion that I hadn’t already done physical therapy. I was like, “Oh, you mean the physical therapy that I did have but that you denied my claims for?” I could feel my blood begin to boil, but I let it go. I knew the doctor’s people would straighten it out. And they did. The insurance has since approved the MRI, and I’m just waiting for the MRI people to call me to set up the appointment.

I feel like I need to keep my expectations low, though. Reading between the lines of what the doctor told me: surgery is unlikely to bring my shoulder back to its previous state. What they can probably do for me is to get rid of the pain. It’s less likely that I’ll get back a full range of motion. She says most patients in my situation are happy with just the pain relief, and yeah, I think that would be enough for me, too. But even that can only happen if the MRI reveals something that can be fixed surgically. Otherwise, my only options will be more physical therapy, more cortisone shots, and a lot of positive thinking.

• I reread the last year or so of my blog today. I like rereading my posts. It reinforces my memory of recent times. I reaffirms my decision to keep a blog. It inspires me to write more.
• Old blog post of note: last year in June I mentioned trying a dead hang while on the walking trail. I wrote, “My hands and shoulders were like “WTF!” Is it suspicious that I developed a serious shoulder problem later that same year? Can’t help but wonder. That brief dead hang seemed innocuous then (I made no mention of being in pain afterward), and maybe it was. But also, maybe middle-aged women with limited upper-body strength ought to be more cautious in the future?
• I keep falling asleep while watching TV at night. At first it was accidental, but lately I’ve been aware as it’s happening and have chosen to snooze there instead of going to bed. It’s weird, because sleeping on my daybed, with the lights on and the TV still playing, is not very comfortable. But there’s a sort of logic to this bad habit. I’ve really come to dread the moment when I wake up in the morning. It will be too early and I won’t want to get up, but I’ll have to, because staying in bed will only lead to more shoulder pain, more grogginess, and a longer-feeling workday. I’ll be tired all day, and I will struggle to find enough mental clarity for my work, and the work will be grueling. No wonder I don’t want to go to bed! Meanwhile, if I snooze in my daybed, I won’t have to go to bed. It will stretch out the night and postpone the morning. I really can’t blame myself, but it’s not a helpful habit, and I should cut it out.
• The snow is mostly gone, but mounds and patches remain. From the upstairs bathroom window, which looks out on the woods behind the house, the ground is brown-and-white-splotched, like a pinto horse. On the other side of the house, where the sun hits strongest, the daffodils have started to come up!

• In the daily Spelling Bee, it’s funny how often my last answer–the one that finally gets me to the Genius level–is a negative word. Today it was DEICIDE. That’s certainly not a top word in my vocabulary. I wouldn’t want to kill anyone, let alone a god.
• Related: a pair of people came to my door yesterday to peddle Jesus. I sternly told them that I wasn’t interested, that I never would be, and that they should not come back. In retrospect, I might have been a bit harsh, but I can’t seem to make myself feel bad about it. I don’t go to their homes and try to talk them out of their religion (i.e., figuratively kill their god). I respect their beliefs, and I don’t trespass on their property. So I think it’s extremely arrogant and disrespectful of them to come here and try to push their ideas on me. They need to know it’s not OK.

• Today at work I had to do the corrections on an issue. As usual, T had picked apart some of the pages and insisted on changes that were not only unnecessary but totally at odds with our company-wide mandate to save time wherever possible. I asked him (with my boss’s blessing) to consider changing his mind about one of them, and his reaction was exactly what I should have expected. That is, I knew better than to ask, and my punishment was to feel worse after having tried.
• A large section of the front yard is now snow-free and I can see grass. It’s exciting to finally see some color after having nothing but white to look at for so long. We’ve had snow on the ground nonstop since that big storm in January.
• After so much warm weather, it’s hard to recall how icy the driveway had been just days before. But, one day last week, Marshall slipped on the ice as he was headed to the bus. He fell hard on the ground but then picked himself up and got on the bus. At 8:00 a.m. I was woken from a deep sleep by a phone call from the school nurse. She said his elbow was massively swollen and asked us to come get him. So his dad picked him up from school and brought him to the doctor. Then I took him for an x-ray. There were no broken bones, luckily, just a lot of broken routines for the day. The swelling went down quickly, and by nighttime his elbow was back to normal size.
• I felt bad for the kid–falls are no fun–but I also felt bad for myself. Rarely these days do I sleep so soundly. It was such bad luck that I needed to be woken up at that particular time. 🙁

• Livia and I finished the mystery game we’d been working on. I can’t say we loved it. We struggled with several of the challenges and ultimately used a few hints. But we enjoyed spending the time together.
• Over the last few days I’ve gotten a bunch of medical bills, many of them for healthcare we got last year. Apparently our health insurance only just processed some of the claims from December. When I started to look deeper into things, I also found that the service that was supposed to automatically handle my HRA claims had quietly and inexplicably given up in mid-December, leaving all the late-December claims undone. We now have, including the bills I just received, nine claims that we haven’t been reimbursed for. It took hours of scrolling through info on my health insurance website to figure out exactly at what point we crossed the reimbursement line and which claims had already been reimbursed and which ones hadn’t. And God knows how long the paperwork will take. Ugh. Like I don’t have better things to do with my time. America’s healthcare system is a joke.
• My reward for all that hard work was a migraine just before bedtime.

On February 22, I wrote about the (then) impending storm which has since become known as the Blizzard of ’26. Here’s how the storm played out for us.

• I had done well to take “before” photos of the yard, but then I neglected to take the “after” pictures. Ooops. I also wasn’t able to find an official snow total for my town. Due to drifting and the blanket of snow already on the ground, I can’t say with any certainty how much snow we got, but I think was over two feet.
• T.F. Green Airport got a record-breaking 37.9 inches.
• At one point the snow was accumulating so fast in Providence that the plows themselves started getting stuck, and the city was forced to suspended plow service for a while.
• We were fortunate in that we never lost power (not everyone was so lucky). Our cable went out in the evening, but that’s wasn’t such a bad thing. Instead of watching TV, I caught up on my reading.
• When I took the kids to their routine dentist appointments on the following Wednesday, the streets were still in a sorry state. Plowed only as far as the white lines, the roads were narrower than usual, and with the shoulders and sidewalks blocked, pedestrians were forced to walk in the middle of the road. In some places there was still snow in the road, and in others, such as certain intersections, it was piled so high that it blocked my visibility. I don’t do as much bad-weather driving these days, and those conditions made me anxious. I was quite relieved to get home safely.
• School was canceled for four whole days! After having had almost two weeks off (the previous week having been February vacation), it was a real shock to the kids’ systems to have to return on Friday.
• Today is March 8, and there’s still a significant amount of snow on the ground, but it has been steadily melting. Every day I hear the drip, drip, drip. This coming week is supposed to be warm. I wonder if it will be enough to finally melt all the snow away.

• Daylight Saving Time starts today. I hate it. I hate it a little less now than I did when the kids where small and the shift would throw our schedule off for weeks, but it’s still a nuisance. It confuses my sense of time.
• Today one of my blog’s random quotes caught my eye: “I don’t need time. What I need is a deadline.” (Duke Ellington). Ain’t that the truth? I keep trying to impose deadlines on myself, but they have no power to motivate me. Only a real deadline–one that is consequential and set by someone else–is going to have any effect on me. And sometimes not even that. I am like a boulder. It takes a lot of force to move me.

On the day of my appointment with the orthopedist, my husband had some errands to run. He took my car, promising he’d bring it back a half hour before my appointment time, which would give me enough time to get there. Ultimately he returned 25 minutes later than promised, and the look I gave him as I walked up to the car will, he said, cause him lasting trauma. And when I reached the car, I screamed at him, lashing out like the wounded animal that I am.

Luckily for him, I was in a hurry and couldn’t waste a lot of time yelling at him. And luckily for both of us, I made surprisingly good time driving across town and was only about 12 minutes late for my appointment, which was not late enough for them to send me packing. Whew!

When I got home, I found that he’d cleaned the kitchen, fixed the broken screen door, and watered the piano. I had already forgiven him when he called me on my cell phone to apologize, but I really appreciated those extra touches. He’d made a mistake, but then he made amends. You can’t ask for more than that.

But damn, he set the bar high when he did those extra things! Now we both gotta be careful not to make any mistakes. ;P

The orthopedist said that my shoulder pain is likely caused by a torn rotator cuff. Her “prescription” was a cortisone shot, which she gave me then and there, and Aleve daily for any continuing pain. She also recommended I try a topical product, such as Icy Hot. She said to come back in four weeks for a reevaluation and, if necessary, she’d send me for an MRI at that point.

After getting the shot, I accidentally fell asleep while watching TV and woke up in excruciating pain. I figured the extra pain was the shot taking its toll, so I iced my shoulder and took some Aleve. My pain returned to its usual level the following day and has not changed in the intervening week+, so I don’t think the cortisone shot worked. I called the doctor’s office and left a message asking that we move the MRI up.

Aleve, by the way, didn’t do anything for me, at least not in the quantity I was willing to take. And as for the Icy Hot, what a joke. I’d purchased the nighttime healing version, and I tried it for three nights, each time using a little more of the product, hoping it would have some effect. But each time it felt barely cool, let alone icy, and it was never hot. It also never provided any kind of pain relief. What it did do was practically burn out my nasal passages with its mentholated smell. Not recommended.

I’ve discovered, though, that if I sleep with a pillow next to me and drape my arm over it at a particular angle, I’m less likely to wake up in screaming agony. The only problem is that the pillow tends to fall off the bed, at which time I revert to my usual sleeping position and pain ensues. So, next step: figure out how to keep the pillow from falling.

Last Wednesday I went for a physical therapy session. The therapist and I agreed that, since I would be in a holding pattern until the MRI, I could continue my exercises on my own at home. That’s good and will save me a lot of money. But it also meant that I had to say good-bye to her and ask her to say good-bye to the other therapists for me. I enjoyed their company and will miss them. I should send them a card. (I probably won’t, but I really should.).