All This Up One Hill and Down Another Makes Me a Little Queasy

Whew, today was a long one. And I'm pooped so I'm just updating in point form rather than going on like I usually do.

First, to the doctor.

Who tells me that if the Lyrica's not working by now, it ain't gonna, so I can stop taking it (yay, no more confusion!) Like when the doctor's office called the other day to set up my appointment for my PAP test in February and for a full 24 hours I couldn't figure out why they were calling three months in advance. God, it was like a terrifying full-clarity preview of my not-so-golden years.

My biceps reflex is hyper-reflexic and I guess this is an indication of something or other to do with my spine. No one had tested my reflexes before but I guess that's what happens when you see two locums at three different points in between seeing your own doctor - no continuity.

SO, next I'm heading off to a neurologist (well, in 2 months or so when I can get an appointment) and in the meantime, getting an MRI to help rule out the next possible diagnosis - cervical spine compression of the nerves that run down my arms.

According to my doctor's note to my unit, I'm unable to do any activity that requires physical exertion until at least after I'm re-assessed in three months.

Which means that I'll need to see a DND doctor to confirm that who'll put me on a medical category which will put me into a holding pattern. What that holding pattern means is that during that time I can't go on courses or be promoted.

I guess I'll be staying home this summer then and then everything else will be a year behind. Not that a summer at home is such a bad thing, though. :)

Then, the lawyer. Not too much detail here, sorry, just the basics.

It's no fun listening to your own 911 recording when you don't remember any of it. Trust me on that one.

However, one of the charges has been dropped due to some term I can't remember at the moment. AHHH, technicality.

We're hoping to plea bargain me down to something that doesn't involve a criminal record. Since that will be very bad for my security clearance and any future plans to deploy for the military.

Which, really, is the entire reason I'm going through all this.

Otherwise, I go to trial.

On the way home I noticed that I'd lost my bus pass. But the bus driver let me come home without it. Of course, I still haven't found it.

To top a day of good news and bad off, about an hour ago whilst trying to fix a necklace with my teeth, I chipped off a big chunker of my front tooth.

*sigh*

Tomorrow, however, is a new day and today wasn't actually all bad news. So, there's that to get me through the night.

And, since I've been vetting some new music on the MP3 player this week, let's throw in some lyrics here. Cheers.

i'm a slow motion accident
lost in coffee rings and fingerprints
i don't wanna feel anything but I do
and it all comes back to you

Remembrance

I swore into the Reserves last year on November 10th. According to the 'rules', I'm not allowed to have my Distinctive Environmental Uniform (or DEU's), in other words, my dress uniform, until after one year of service.

Apart from the shock that I've been around a year today, it's been very disheartening to know that the rules will not be 'bent' to have allowed me to have my dress uniform before Remembrance Day. I will go to my second Remembrance Day ceremony as a Reservist without being able to participate. That I will be there as a bystander, again.

Especially this year, when I understand so much more what it really means and in some ways, how it feels to be a part of this group of people.

Past, present and future. My future.

Last night I went out for a jog and when I came home, there was a black garbage bag on my front step.

I thought it was the long jacket that my stepmother was lending me and lifting it I thought, "Shit, did the woman give me her whole wardrobe?"

Tossing it on the bed I opened it up to find it was full of dress uniform pieces, representing 22 years of service, begged for me from a retiring woman by one of the girls at the unit.

I get the feeling that the pieces that actually fit me are the ones from the beginning of this woman's career but regardless, after a day of hemming, ironing and lint-brushing, Carla stopped by with all the trade specific buttons and pins, as well as a pair of her boyfriend's gloves, that I needed to complete a full uniform.

Tomorrow, I will be marching as part of the unit at the cenotaph our unit is attached to. It was built in 1920 to honor the soldiers of WWI.

I don't have the words to tell you how proud I am to be able to.

Let's Just Get to the Point, Shall We?

I have an interview tonight (right in the middle of Thursday TV night, the nerve of these people). The interview is called something with three letters (the military is 'fond' of acronyms) which I have no idea what they mean.

Basically, it's so someone who doesn't know me can decide whether or not the army will allow me to change my trade.

In preparation I need to fill out a self-assessment form which wants to know how willing I am to embrace change, do things I don't like which provide no personal gain, persevere at tasks and how well I function in extreme and continuous adverse mental and physical conditions.

They want examples.

I have decided that I have one answer that adequately and eloquently covers everything they want to know.

I completed basic training being unable to move my hands for six weeks, with a femoral stress fracture for the last three, without complaining, surrounded 24/7 by a 100 people (none of whom have been alive for even 3/4 of the time I've been a smoker) and I never actually physically attacked anyone once.

So, really, let me do what I want, hey?

You Don't Know if You're Healed - Until You Try.

I got home yesterday at 3:30. After two hours of sleep since friday, I figured "What the hell!", had a bath, sat outside for a little while on the porch and went to bed at 5 pm.

I woke up at 1 am, having to pee.

I went to get up and couldn't. Absolutely every muscle in my body refused to work. So I rolled slowly slowly over and out of the covers. Then I fell asleep and rested after my mini-ordeal until the cold woke me up again.

Drank a ton of juice to counteract the dehydration, took some advil and extra-strength tylenol and went back to bed.

It's close to 10 am now and after a hot shower and some bergamot tea I am walking like... well....

imagine this... a 90 year old with two hip replacements. Then imagine taking away their walker. That shuffle where they move their legs by swinging their hips with the arms hanging straight down cause they don't have the strength to lift them unless it's onto something to lean on? Bingo. That's me.

Luckily, I have 4 hours to lay here and contemplate how to get to my massage.

This weekend, I ran the obstacle (confidence) course. The first time without gear. The second time with 40 lbs of gear, helmet and rifle. The second time, every time I landed my legs gave out. By the time I got halfway along to the rope tower I was getting the feeling that supporting my entire body weight with only my tendon damaged arms wasn't going to work much longer. I gave the tower a shot and .... stopped there.

The leg itself wasn't hurting at that point but given that it was giving out, we decided I would just assess as I went along and do what I could.

Then, came the rappel. 75 feet down a mountainside. There was no way I was missing that, I tell ya. The problem isn't the rappel - it's dragging yourself back up the nearly vertical side path by a knotted rope. The second rappel was with gear, so I skipped that one but continued on with the third one (with gear) since we were just carrying on with a defense through the woods and not climbing back up.

The leg was starting to hurt by the end of the day but I decided to push through the night exercise as much as I could. The only bit I didn't do was the rappel. Which I'm totally disappointed about. A night rappel in the pitch black down a mountain in the driving rain? So cool.

I didn't do that part due to the fact that we'd be slogging a kilometre through the woods in the dark after and any missteps could be pretty serious for me.

Except for that and the obstacle course challenge the next morning, I did everything else this weekend. I'm pretty damn proud of myself.

At one point in the first obstacle course - the 12 foot tower that you get down from by using a knotted rope - I didn't have enough hand strength left to stop/slow my progress and slammed my way down by right kneecap.

Today, neither leg works. My kneecap is twice the size of the other. But we did all this in the rain and I'm not feeling the flu so that's a bonus.

So, not fully healed yet but apart from sore muscles and tons of bruises (which everyone else had too), this old woman made a pretty fine showing this weekend, especially since I've done nothing but rest for two months while any fitness I had slowly drained away. :)

The lesson here is that I can do it and do it fairly well, even running less than peak. And next year? The goal is to be a full-on member of the 'A'team that runs the course fast enough to beat the rest of the units instead of one of the one's watching.

That was my unit, by the way. Our ten 'man' team ran the course one minute and 27 seconds faster than the next closest. Even our 'B' team (ie: the slower/older/management guys) ran the course faster than one of the 'A' teams. The Commander's Challenge (to win 'right of line' - will explain that another time) consisted of a bunch of things - including pulling one of the big trucks around a track. We took the trophy home again this year.

I'm going to lay down now and contemplate how excellent I am for a couple hours.

Fem(oral) Fatale

I know my doctor loves me.

But I think he hates me, too. Just a little. In a loving kind of way.

Cause I am SO one of those people who is not satisfied with things like, "There seems to be a stress fracture, so you need to....."

I want to know WHERE it is, HOW it happened, HOW big it is, WHEN it will get better, WHEN it'll stop hurting, WHEN I can get back to walking like Jen instead of someone I don't know. I feel all wrong, not like myself. (YJ - you'll understand that one). I want to know WHAT it looks like. HOW it happened. I want to know WHY it hurts. I want to understand what's going on in there.

Here's the why and the how.

Bones are constantly attempting to remodel and repair themselves, especially during a sport where extraordinary stress is applied to the bone. Over time, if enough stress is placed on the bone that it exhausts the capacity of the bone to remodel, a weakened site -- a stress fracture -- on the bone may appear. The fracture does not appear suddenly. It occurs from repeated traumas, none of which is sufficient to cause a sudden break, but which, when added together, overwhelm the osteoblasts that remodel the bone.

Stress fractures commonly occur in sedentary people who suddenly undertake a burst of exercise (whose bones are not used to the task). They may also occur in Olympic-class athletes who do extraordinary quantities of high-impact exercise, or in soldiers who march long distances.

Muscle fatigue can also play a role in the occurrence of stress fractures. For every mile a runner runs, more than 110 tons of force must be absorbed by the legs. Bones are not made to stand that much energy on their own and the muscles act as shock absorbers for the excess force. But, as muscles become tired and stop absorbing most of the shock, the bones experience greater amounts of stress. Finally, when muscles (usually in the lower leg - ie: shin splints) become so fatigued that they stop absorbing any shock, all forces are transferred to the bones.

Lack of sleep and the ability of your muscles to repair themselves in such short rest periods is also a big factor in this. Our platoon was never allowed more than four hours of sleep in any 24 hour period for two months. One day, we had an afternoon off and they patrolled our rooms constantly - we weren't allowed to be laying down, we had to be doing something, anything. Add that in with the inability then of your bones to repair themselves with no rest and you've got...well, me.

It helps my particular need-to-know "quirk" that I work in a hospital. In the medical imaging department, no less. I can talk to the radiologists about my films. I can burn them to a CD. I can pull them up on the massive screens at the hospital and apply the measuring tools.

It is so cool. And it makes me happy to SEE. Strangely, it makes me feel better, too.

Our MRI machine has just undergone a shitload of upgrades and to calibrate it they ask for volunteers from the staff so next Tuesday, I will be MRI'ing myself. There's no guarantee they'll actually use my left side or my femur and there will be no 'report' but the films will be there and maybe, just maybe, I can see the fracture inside the bone itself. Or get a radiologist to show it to me.

SO COOL.

In the meantime.... films for you to see. I'd recommend that you biggy them.

In them (if it shows up properly) you can see layers where the bone tried to heal itself over the course of the last portion of the SQ (soldier qualification). On the awesome screens at the hospital I could see six. That means that the bone tried to 'glue' over the fracture (or repair itself or whatever words you wish to use, my doctor used 'glue') at least six times. I measured the most obvious of them and they covered a real-time area of 6.25 cm (or roughly 2.5 inches). That's freaking HUGE!


*biggy me*
Then another view, but sideways..that's my kneecap there off to the right side.


*biggy me*
And, finally, a hip view with the fracture site down at the bottom, the fracture is actually closer to my hip than to my knee, think 8 inches from my hip bone on the inside of my thigh...


*biggify*

One of the girls tonight called and one of her comments was, "You know, you will FOREVER be the girl who completed SQ with a broken leg, right?"

I don't know about that, but I do know tomorrow night is our 'welcome back' party and I'm sure everyone will weigh in with their thoughts. I'm especially looking forward to what badder cop's got to say.

when I wake to realize all I've done
i'll be breaking strings
and all you're gonna feel
is untied

------

no I don't get scared when I walk alone
i have been on this beat enough to know
that when shit happens it is just your turn
so you deal with it and it happens everyday
I don't know quite where I belong

Correction. Cabot Needs to Shoot ME and Get HIMSELF a Goldfish

Since I've been home and have been spending lots of time sleeping while we wait and see how well (or not) my body heals.

The swelling's gone down pretty much 100%, although in the afternoons and early mornings my fingers are still a bit stiff, no big deal.

My arms and my one leg though? Ouchie mama.

I'm just a'limping around, trying not to pick anything up.

My mind has been insisting that it's my bones that hurt and while I know that's not really possible, it's just the way it feeeeels. I go for my hour and a half deep tissue massage once a week and we've been working on getting all the knots out and hoping that takes care of it all.

We'd thought it was my quads and so had been focusing on them but that didn't seem to be working so hot so I looked at the muscles that run closer to the bone itself and Voila! hip flexor!

All of the hip flexors are primarily located on the anterior upper thigh or hip. There are 6 main muscles involved with hip flexion and it can be very difficult to distinguish which of them is actually injured. Considering their location it makes sense that pain will always occur on the anterior upper thigh/ hip. Symptoms will be associated with actions that move the leg forward or upward.

Ahh, so that's why I can't lift my leg when I walk!

So, for the last two weeks we've been doing terribly painful things with my left hip. Trust me, anyone who's ever had deep tissue massage understands how painful it is and let me tell you hip flexor manipulation is a whole new freakin' category of hurt.

Avoid it. Unless you're dying.

Anyways, I still can't walk properly and my thigh hurts like a son-of-a-bitch. And running? Whoa, forget it. If my house was on fire and I could hear Cabot screaming, I doubt I could run 100 metres to save him.

But, my massage therapist tells me that my muscles are pretty much all good at this point.

We've also worked seperately on my pecs and my deltoids. Still nothing there, either.

The pain and weakness in my arms feels very similar to the pain in my leg.

Since I've been home now for almost four weeks, this is getting a little ... worrying. Especially since this weekend we're to spend three days on the ranges (shooting things! yay!) and I can't run.

I made an appointment to see my doctor on Friday and then, called him back later to see if I could get xrays in advance of my leg so he'd have the results.

The radiologist's report indicates osteophytes (in a nutshell, they're an indication of arthritis but no big deal, really) and a periosteal thickening at the upper femur.

Indicating a femoral stress fracture.

Femoral stress fractures also are rare, representing only about 5 percent of all stress fractures. They are, however, extremely important because they are difficult to diagnose and have a high incidence of fracture nonunion, complete fractures, or avascular necrosis, which may result in an unrecoverable injury.

In it's simplest form, this means I have a broken leg.

A broken leg I've had since at least the final two weeks of basic.

It all makes sense now, doesn't it?

And could very well account for all the rest of the symptoms. I mean, at that point, EVERYTHING hurt so it made sense that they were just looking at what they could see - the swelling and the numbness of my extremities.

It occurred to me that I should get additional xrays of my arms but 1. I think I'll wait until I see the doctor and 2. I'm afraid of finding out I've got two broken arms as well.

Because basic with a fractured femur?

Wow. I AM one tough cookie.

But basic with a fractured femur and two fractured arms?

Holy SHIT, I am so fucking tough.

Is that Mail in Your Pocket or Are You Just Happy to See Me?

Last night I'm sitting outside in my little chair on my little porch with a little glass of Laphroig, listening to the utter fantabulistic silence of my new neighborhood when from around the corner I hear my name being called.

(and yeah, I know my whole name is in here in places but I still prefer not to have it all like yelling itself over the 'net so you're getting **'d bits)

"Jennifer C**e! Jennifer C**e! Is that you? Finally?"

I'm thinking "WTF?" so I haul my sorry self out of my chair and peek around the corner to find ........ a postman.

Kay, now it's 7 pm and I have no idea why they're working so late and even walking their routes on a Friday night but whatever, who am I to question dedication?

He hands me my mail and enthusiastically chirps, "It's SO good to finally see you!"

I'm figuring, at this point, that he's been my mailman for a couple of months and has just really been bummed out that I was never here. Maybe he's just the kind of guy who likes to know his customers. You know?

I'm kind of playing along, "Yes! It's me! It's so good to see you too!"

Turns out (he's been with the post office for 30 years) that 20 years ago he worked with a girl named Jennifer C**e, with similar coloring to me but longer hair who was about 18 years old or so.

Considering that, in a city of 250,000, the chances of their being another JC are less than slim and that I would have been that age with longer hair - it is totally creepy that it couldn't have been me.

I didn't start working until I was 19. I never worked at the post office. He looked vaguely familiar but once you start to travel and move around a lot, everyone starts to look familiar in some way so my memory is tragically unreliable. It's always other people who remember ME, the onus has never been on me to remember them.

But hey, it was really nice to have someone I don't know so happy to see me!

I've got a sheer tonnage of emails to respond to so I'm going to bug out for now and try to get through those.

For now, another picture of me in front of the concertina wire with my red duct tape field bandage, since I'm way too lazy at this point to upload more than one at a time...


*biggify*
And I'm going to try and embed a video of one of the things that the boys in my section did to amuse themselves while I wasn't around to keep an eye on them. Ha. This is Berczynski, a 19 year old Polish boy from Toronto - whom I spent most of my time wanting to kill - although there was a very unexpected twist there on the last day that I will probably not ever tell you about. Except in person. (And no, I didn't sleep with him).

They'd all taken up cigar smoking and had figured out that if they mangled the fan, it sounded like machine gun fire. Note the really bad arm tan.

Be amazed all over again that I didn't actually try and kill any of them.

(note: this just kills the upload time of the site so for now, until I can find the will and motivation to convert it and put it up in the galleries, you're SOL if you haven't already watched it.)

Then...what's next? Besides settling in, relearning my job at the hospital (which is, as always, short-staffed and has booked me with full shifts to mid-October already), doing stuff with the unit and trying to decide what I'm going to do about the rest of my training?

Skydiving.

Yes.