Feet are for shit. Hope it goes away. Plantar fasciitis didn't for me though.
Also known as an interdigital neuroma, a Morton's neuroma is a benign (non-cancerous) tumor of a nerve. Morton's neuroma is not actually a tumor, but a thickening of the tissue that surrounds the digital nerve leading to the toes.
If it's not a tumor, why did you call it a tumor in the previous sentence?
https://orthoinfo.aaos.org/en/diseases--conditions/mortons-neuroma
I can't believe I forgot about my favorite one weird trick, which is just to google PT stretches and exercises and implement them. Or even better, to find the PDFs or slides from classes for training the PT assistants or therapists. There's a wealth!
I hope everyone takes this post as a cue to natter on about your own ailments.
I shouldn't have to make that explicit.
I'm trying to get a note saying I need a cane so I can buy a sword-cane.
I hope everyone takes this post as a cue to natter on about your own ailments.
I have an odd soreness in the muscle just above my elbow; I don't think there's any serious underlying problem, it seems like exactly the sort of thing that should just go away on it's own, but it hasn't yet.
Have you tried hitting it with a Bible, heebie?
I suspected I had managed to dance myself a Morton's (it's a classic broken dancer problem) but it disappeared and never bothered me again when I skipped class for a week and took bog standard ibuprofen 3x daily. Rubbing Voltarol on it did nothing, which worried me, and it hurt enough that I was visibly grimacing every time I tombe'd onto that side.
This post is disappointing
13: No, I've never thought "I'd hit that" and then picked up a Bible.
16: Just as I would have expected! Because you liberals hate God.
ailments.
All my life I have wanted to be physically graceful. Dance lessons some years ago didn't work-- I can work out where my limbs should go with a little practice, but apparently can't keep a beat. And the effortless things clumsy people with rhythm can do-- a few little steps at the right time, shoulder or hip adjustments in harmony, those are not for me either. Good thing I don't live on the veldt.
I'd like to be thinner, but I also like dumplings.
I started a new blood pressure medicine which has indeed solved my blood pressure problem but also makes me dizzy and queasy for brief moments all through the day. I don't know if this counts as an ailment.
I'm clumsy enough that at small dizzy spell isn't really noticeable.
Anyway, let's all try to keep Tony Dow and Jerry Mathers straight.
20, 24 yeah I got carried away there. Just out of my age bracket to have those details down and I misread a headline. It is still permitted to M to the B.
A year ago I was in a really good place, conditioning-wise, but my body was falling apart: both hips, a shoulder and two separate spots in my back. I couldn't limp through a jog any more. I decided that I was just getting old and I became involuntarily sedentary.
A year later ... I feel great! I just started exercising again, so we'll see how long it takes to break down again.
natter on about your own ailments.
So this is fun: I finally got COVID (very mild) but also got a really acute toothache. Dr Google strongly suggests that acute tooth pain is not a symptom: general ache that includes your teeth/jaw, sure, but this was isolated to a single tooth (with additional pain if I tried to eat anything challenging).
The toothache came on prior to any other symptoms, but probably did coincide with infection, so the timing works. I'm now a week+ past any lingering symptoms, and the toothache is reduced to a very mild background.
So is it all coincidence, or is this just another example of COVID being the jack-of-all-sicknesses? At some point I'll go to a dentist, but I wasn't going to try to make an appointment while contagious, and by the time I was on the mend, the ache was vastly reduced.
Maybe a real dental problem, and the COVID jacked up your pain sensitivity and made it noticeable?
I think you're supposed to see the dentist twice a decade with or without pain.
As tooth nerves die, the pain decreases, so my guess is that your cavity and your Covid just happened to have similar trajectories.
This is lisinopril-hydrochloro something. I was on just lisinopril before without problems, so I assume it's the added wossname that's make me dizzy/queasy.
I can't spell it either, but that's what I have too. The only problem I've had is lots more peeing in the morning.
As anyone who follows me at the other place knows, because my method for dealing with illness is to complain about it incessantly (while also seeking treatment, though!), this has been a crappy month+ for me. Besides an upper respiratory infection and pink eye (following my dubious decision to spend a day with two five-year-olds), I've been struggling with lymphedema again as a consequence of my cancer surgeries, and the treatments have been just really annoying, uncomfortable, and intrusive.*
The good news is that the occupational therapist I saw today said that the treatments have been doing a really great job, and that--while bodies shouldn't actually work this way according to current theories of how to manage lymphedema--I might be able to get away with doing the treatments intermittently, at least for the near future.
*First stage of treatment: https://bodyofhealthandlife.com/lymphedema-wrapping/ (This is awful and takes forever, especially if your affected hand/arm is your dominant one.)
Second stage: https://www.compressionguru.com/sigvaris-compreflex-arm (Less awful than stage 1, still hot and annoying.) plus https://tactilemedical.com/our-lymphedema-solutions/for-the-upper-body/flexitouch-plus/ (I have both the arms and core garments. Sessions take 60 minutes every day.)
Third stage: the pump from stage 2 and a flat-knit compression sleeve and glove (so not the cute kinds with all the patterns)
I'm in the second stage right now, which makes me feel more like a robot than ever. I still can't believe my insurance is actually covering that machine.
Thanks! I will no doubt continue complaining regardless.
Tony Dow is, as of 3:08 ET on Tuesday, apparently alive:
https://deadline.com/2022/07/tony-dow-alive-death-announced-in-error-1235078184/
Yeah, hospice time doesn't work like regular time.
My allergies were bad enough that I took a covid test even though my only symptom is a runny nose. Still covid free.
28: I had random, inexplicable single tooth pain for years. It started following some dental work (but was not one of the teeth worked on!). I was very lucky to have a good dentist who didn't do increasing interventions. It turns out sometimes nerves just go haywire and send pain signals for no reason. Definitely get it checked out, but my thing was rare, and the dentist told me that a common trajectory is for patients to have unnecessary root canals that don't solve the problem (diagnosis and treatment happen at specialists in "orofacial pain.") Mine was treatable and resolved after several years of medication. On the off-chance it's that, I hope it goes away on its own!
Complaints: I think I have a mild RSI from yard work. I work with my hands, but nothing has changed there, and it's worse in my non-dominant hand, so pretty sure it's the weeding and re-bricking the front walk. I overworked a leg muscle at the gym, then slept funny and have serious neck and shoulder pain. I feel SO OLD this week. I'm basing my (not very hard) workouts on what hurts the least on a given day. Owwwww.
I have a funny dental pain thing that my dentist has confirmed is not actually tooth-related -- seems to be something to do with my sinuses. It has something to do with air pressure, but not in a way I fully understand (like, one thing that would reliably bring it on was my kids swimming lessons, where something about the HVAC in the pool area set it off), and it comes and goes at fairly long intervals: I'll have a bad afternoon every couple of months.
At its worst it's pretty intense, but Tylenol knocks it back.
My dad was always on medication for dental adjacent nerve pain. I don't think it was well controlled, but not a huge problem either.
Hydrochlorothiazide. Sometimes abbreviated HCTZ. It's a diuretic.
I continue to be mildly annoyed by having had a mild sore throat for at least the past two years, and every couple of weeks thinking it's a sign of COVID before I remember how long it's been going on. Someday I should get an ENT to check it out, maybe. Result of snoring? Sign of LPR? Something else weird?
45: That's certainly worth seeing an ENT about! Any chance it's postnasal drip caused by a mild allergen in your house or environment? Exposure to secondhand smoke? As I recently had to remind myself, my sore throats are almost always caused by postnasal drip.
In the meanwhile, I'd be curious whether Zyrtec (or Claritin) and/or a neti pot/sinus wash made a difference in your symptoms.
Here's my One Weird Trick for general well-being -- when I'm standing in line or in some other such situation where I would become bored and/or impatient, I stand on one foot. When that foot starts to get tired, or I start to lose my balance, then I switch to the other foot. The obvious benefit of this is that it forces me to be in the moment and focus on my body. I'm still waiting on the results of the study for definitive proof that it reduces foot, leg, and back pain.
I'm afraid this won't work for everybody. I suggested it to my mom, and she said she can't stand on one foot at all.
I can't stand on my left foot but the right foot works.
49: Is the left foot the one with the ankle issues? I'm not sure, but I vaguely remember that I had a hard time keeping my balance on one of my feet when I started doing this, but now I can stand pretty well on either foot.
51: Well, that sucks.
I guess you really do need that sword-cane.
Insurance won't cover it without a medical indication.
47: Maybe! I have wondered if it's something in the house, since I started spending so much more time there, and I can't swear I noticed it pre-pandemic. I did try some months of daily Claritin and then Allegra, to no particular effect. The fact that most of this overlapped with "oh, crap, the medical system is overloaded and I'd really like to stay out of medical facilities" has been a disincentive to doing anything about it.
I also have a longer-running ENT issue which might or might not be connected, where I gag very easily if my nose starts running - seems like something in the nose-to-throat connection doesn't work quite right. No idea if it's related.
27 is me also. Decades of chronic back pain cured by giving up tennis and becoming sedentary. When I start to get fit, things start breaking, because my tendons are apparently all made of wet tissue paper now. Also going out to the blueberry patch or garden for a healthy hour of puttering is incapacitating. Nothing makes me stronger any more: exercise is strictly an erosional process now. Maybe the only exception the last few decades has been ultimate frisbee, where the skills I aquired while avoiding schoolwork as a young sprat have remained sufficient to allow me to run around with much younger and more athletic people, and which running magically did not hurt me, during the intervals that I could find a group to run around with.
56: That is profoundly depressing. I keep hoping that PT or acupuncture or massage can make things better
It's not that bad, really! This is just the complaining thread, I thought. The good side: when I did take up tennis again after 5 years off I hadn't lost anything except fitness. Timing is right there, and I can still rip them if I can get to them. And niggling injuries are not really that bad. My back problems were worse in my 20s than they are now. And of course the one thing we of middle age have over the whippersnappers is pain tolerance. I read that somewhere.
I only play tennis on grass courts because it's easier on my joints.
I finally tested negative for Covid last Saturday, and it's been over two weeks since I first had symptoms, but I looked up data on Covid's infectious period and the science of "you're probably not infectious after 14 days" isn't quite as settled as I'd hoped.* I don't think I'd feel as much anxiety around this if I hadn't decided to visit my parents before looking at the data, something I'd planned to do before getting sick. I guess if they're not sick by the weekend it's probably ok.
*Probability is low, to be sure, but there are more hedges and caveats than I expected.
Feet are for shit. Hope it goes away. Plantar fasciitis didn't for me though.
I had plantar fasciitis for a couple of years, almost certainly the result (and definitely not helped by) greatly increasing the amount of walking I did while not noticing how far down I'd worn my shoes before the pain started. I saw one doctor who didn't seem to know much about it, who recommended looking into orthotics. I decided to get a second opinion and found a doctor in the network who had a background as a runner and some knowledge of sports medicine.* She was much more reluctant to recommend orthotics without trying various physical therapy strategies first.
I can't remember all the exercises except for one: standing on a towel and trying to bunch it up with your toes, which was surprisingly effective. But what finally got rid of my plantar fasciitis entirely was tearing a muscle in my calf and being on crutches for a month. I can't really recommend that strategy. I'm much more disciplined about checking for wear in my shoes and replacing my insoles (I use off-the-shelf arch supports) or the shoes themselves more often.
On the other hand, I've had knee and shin pain off and on since just before the pandemic, probably again from walking too much after changing jobs and shifting to a commute where I could walk much more than drive. If I stick to dirt roads and trails and take care with downhills I generally don't feel pain at all, but I worry that I might be causing subtle, long-term damage because I'll still notice it at times and always notice it if I bend my knee more than I would for walking.
*Not a specialist in sports medicine, and I can't remember what was in her profile. I think she'd either been a specialist before moving to general practice, or she'd done some kind of focus on it in her educational background.
I did a thing where I would write the alphabet in the air with my toes (not moving my leg) and it did seem to help a bit.
58: It's depressing to me, because Tim has let his fitness go and doesn't exercise enough because of ankle and joint pain (osyeoarthritis?).. standard tests ruled out rheumatoid arthritis. And he gets weird leg cramping when he does exert himself. I keep telling him that if he exercises more, these things will get better, and he will have more energy. I so want that to be true for many reasons!
At one point, I pushed him to try chair acupuncture, but he didn't like it. I got him to take magnesium for a bit (chelated in a kind that is supposed to have fewer laxative effects) but he distill got loose-ish stool. I am kind of hopeful that treatment for his hypoglycemia will help. He is finally getting worked up. The endocrinologist thinks it might eb related to his childhood hernia repair and surgical resection of Meckel's diverticulum, since it follows a pattern seen in patients who have had gastric bypass. I really want him to have fewer aches and pains and more energy, I don't want to get sucked into the woo, alternative sphere, but I really feel that allopathic medicine does not have good solutions for these very, real challenges.
Ankle pain. Does anyone have suggestions for ankle pain? He always describes it as feeling like my ankles have out. No trauma or injury. PT didn't help much, but he had previously see n her for shoulder stuff, and she was the shoulder expert, so maybe not the best for ankles.
The towel-wrinkling is one I implemented yesterday. Also there was one particular stretch of my three lower toes which abruptly unkinked something, or rather the sensation fit my mental image of a web of fascia binding the area too tightly, and being stretched apart. And the foot pain was dramatically reduced immediately.
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A downballot elected office for my district is being unexpectedly vacated, nobody good ready to step up it seems so far. It's been suggested I run with my experience advocating before this body. Not clear if I can balance it with everything else, but it might be a big help. I'd have to choose within a few weeks.
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Crush all who stand in your way. Good luck.
66: I recommend going for it. Those are exactly the sorts of offices that need good, well-informed people and rarely get them. (Obviously I don't know any of the specifics, and not having time for it is a very reasonable and common reason to pass.)
Hooray! do it! We're taking over municipalities, one low-level competently implemented agenda at a time!
I'm kind of the opposite of 27/56. If I spend a couple of sedentary weeks my knees will start to hurt, and my back. I suppose it's good for me in the long run but it's annoying all the same.
My more recent complaint is that I've mildly strained a groin muscle and since I don't want to be sedentary I'm not giving it time to heal properly, so it lingers.
Dr. Internet says the treatment for a groin strain is rest, ice, and ibuprofen, and a mild one usually heals in 4-6 weeks. If I don't run for 6 weeks, my knees will hurt (and my mood suffers). So I push it, trying to ease back into exercise before enough time has passed
At its worst it's slightly uncomfortable to walk upstairs. At its best (after like 2 weeks off) I feel nothing from it at all until I've been running for maybe 3, 3.5 miles, at which point the mild discomfort returns, and worsens slowly if I keep going. Then I dial back the distance somewhat, and continue to aggravate the injury so that it will never really go away.
66: The long march through the institutions continues!
Protect you ankles while marching with unfogged brand puttees.
66, 68: Do it!
There is a possibility for something similar for me, depending on a city councilmember getting removed because he doesn't live in his district (very likely), an acquaintance being appointed to his seat (plausible) thereby vacating her seat on the flood board and then my being appointed to that (neither likely nor impossible). The very best part of it, should that tenuous chain of events happen, is that it would likely disappoint Steven Maviglio, who ran for that flood board seat.
Steven Maviglio, you might remember, is the landlord of the charming dude in DC who sheltered protestors who were being kettled during Floyd protests. Maviglio took to twitter to complain that the guy was really risking Maviglio's property and besides, wasn't such a hero because he owed back rent. The local progressives call Maviglio "America's Landlord". (He is a political consultant who considers himself a centrist Dem, but he has just absolutely lost his shit over the Latina progressive city councilmember who wants to help the homeless. His twitter feed is now substantially about her and he's pretty mean about it.)
So, using the estimates from U.S. intelligence, Russian deaths in their invasion of Ukraine are about level with Soviet deaths in 9 years of war in Afghanistan (15,000) or U.S. military deaths in the worst year of Vietnam. The BBC says 5,000 and the Ukrainians say 40,000, so opinions vary. But that's a pretty big war.
On topic because armies march on their feet.
Looks like Soviet population was 262m in 1979, vs Russian population about 146m last year. I don't know if they got other Warsaw Pact troops in Afghanistan.
And the Soviets conscripted big time. Putin is going to need to send the finger-breaking chess bot.
The BBC says 5,000 and the Ukrainians say 40,000, so opinions vary.
I think the BBC figure is "we have identified, by name, 5,000 Russian soldiers who have verifiably been killed in Ukraine" not "this is our best guess for total Russian dead". They're very careful to say that the real number is certainly higher by an unknown amount. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-61987945
75: the Russian population now is actually smaller than it was in 1914 (largely because in 1914 they had Ukraine, Belarus, Finland etc included as part of Russia), and also considerably older. The birthrate plunged 1988-1998 and didn't recover - only partly by 2013 - so the cohort of military-age males in their late teens and twenties right now is unusually small.
Birthrate is also lower among ethnic Russians than among the politically marginalised non-Chechen Muslims and the various other minority groups - they're the proletarii in the original sense, the Roman sense of "breeders", the impoverished and unrepresented lowest class whose role is to produce future soldiers, and they're over-represented among casualties so far and in these local oblast militia battalions that are now being raised and given three weeks' training before deployment. This is causing some ethnic tension among Buryats and others. The Ukrainians say that Russia is prioritising recovering Chechen POWs and leaving Buryats and DNR/LNR conscripts in prison - whether true or not, this is a good story for them to spread.
I don't know if they got other Warsaw Pact troops in Afghanistan.
Not as far as I'm aware - it was Soviet Army only, and, disproportionately,8 Muslim troops from the Central Asian republics.
DNR/LNR
Do not repatriate/Let's not ransom.
The Russians entered this war under the rather childish delusion that they were going to bomb everybody else and nobody was going to bomb them. At Mariupol, Kharkiv, Kyiv, and half a hundred other places, they put that rather naive theory into operation. They sowed the wind and now they are going to reap the whirlwind.
I guess my unstated question is when do the delusions become unsupportable even for a guy with nuclear weapons and the rump-KGB?
No sword-cane. Just some exercises and stretches.
So, really do feel better after the stretching. Apparently, I've been living my life without properly strengthening all the muscles I need to walk.