Too close for missiles; I'm switching to guns.

That line just cracks me up whenever I see it on facebook. :P

But here's the deal, it's been about two weeks now without any considerable improvement in the pain in my back. However, I have learned that ibuprofen helps and tylenol doesn't help that much. See, I took ibuprofen the first few days, then tylenol for a while... then I would take the tylenol and still have pain an hour later, so added ibuprofen and that made a difference. So now it's just ibuprofen, and I realize that I've gone through 50 caplets of ibuprofen almost in two months. :-( Anyone who knows me, personally, knows I absolutely hate taking medicine, and it's just depressing to me that I've gone through almost the entire bottle of ibuprofen and made a significant dent in the tylenol which had 100 caplets. :-(

I don't take anything unless it hurts. Usually when I get up in the morning, it doesn't hurt. Some nights I've slept on the heating pad--I actually prefer not to do this, but even when doing it, I haven't really noticed much change. The longer I stay in bed (from days I've overslept) then the easier I have it the next day. Certain activities seem to exacerbate the pain... which I discovered this morning. I had my (kinda large) bag of stuff I take to class over my left shoulder, and my notebook (which is a "full" 2 1/2 in binder--full meaning sheets and sheets of loose paper and also two bound notebooks--full as in anymore pages won't fit) in my left hand. The idea there was if I don't put stress on my right shoulder, the right shoulder blade (where the pain is localized) won't hurt. By the time I got to my class, I realized that I had been slightly swinging my right arm in my brisk walk to class and my back was burning. Not just when I moved, but even standing still. It took about 10-15 minutes for the pain to die down.

I tested various combinations on my way back to the bus stop--trying to find something, anything that didn't hurt, but the pain (which, once I started walking began creeping back quickly) just intensified for the duration of the walk. I came downtown for lunch and walked from my car to the restaurant--without the notebook it was considerably easier, and I was able to walk without the burning pain which had plagued me in the morning.

Now as I sit here the pain comes and goes. Remember, I took a full dose of ibuprofen at 9am today, and another at 2pm. The pain from the walk was around 9:30 and 12:30... times when the back should not have been inflamed because I had already taken medicine. And of course, I took it at 9am because it was starting to give me trouble since I got up this morning (3am) and I never really got to rest it. Now it's coming up on 4pm, and it's really too soon to take any more (I want to be careful about not taking too many pills because I've been taking them for so long.) They do make a difference, but that's becoming less and less noticeable. Most days, by the time I'm praying 'isha and going to bed, the pain is just searing, burning, and I have to twist my back something weird just to relieve it. (Standing with a weird hunch while I walk or do anything.)

So, since it's been two weeks, one might ask why I haven't gone to the doctor? Well, because I could not foresee myself attending classes fulltime this semester and had, by the time it was too late to change my mind when the money actually came through, only registered half-time. Which means that the health insurance I received through my mom's employer expired the first of the year. So priority item for today was... finding health insurance.

So personal observations... I have experienced back pain in the past. Pain which lasted for about 3 weeks before I went to the doctor... at which point it began to go away. So I'm hopeful that in another week this will start to go away, and I am trying to rest it as much as possible (i.e., not carrying a lot, swinging my arms when I walk, and so forth.) But to be quite honest, it's really just making me miserable. :-(

Here's a picture of one of the buildings on campus... the new campus... the one I had to walk to get to today. I was looking over the blog and it just seems like there's too much text, so thought I'd break it up with a photograph.