Today wasn’t particularly remarkable. I did a bit of stuff like getting a new watch battery in Auntie G’s watch, more deathmin for the paint company (will it ever end?!), a swim and sauna (more of this later) and Book Club meeting
As I was swimming up and down in the wrong pool (again, I will get to this in a moment), I thought it might be useful for myself to describe my different ‘pains’. This isn’t just so that I can wallow in it, but because knowing your body well helps you find ways to recover. It also allows me to monitor things well. Many years ago, some of my work meant I was lurking in the elite sports arena and one of the difference between the very best athletes and the good ones was, the very best were extremely aware of how every bit of their body feels at any given time. So, I thought I would use this concept to develop excellence in describing my variations of pain.
Anyway, back to the swimming in the wrong pool. I really like swimming outdoors and is the main reason I pay an awful lot of money to swim at an upmarket gym chain as they have outdoor pools. Anyhooo, they shut the outdoor pools when it reaches freezing (zero degrees) because of the slippy surfaces that need to be crossed to get to the water. Yesterday, it was definitely at least 3 degrees but when I got to the said gym, the outdoor pool was already covered up and closed! This meant having to swim indoors amongst the children’s swimming lessons, the children not in swimming lessons and other displaced people like me trying to swerve up and down the pool avoiding the people just bobbing around. OK, so this is a first world issue but it definitely makes me grumpy – don’t try to rationalise this for me, accept I will be grumpy when this happens.
Sadly, when I become grumpy my muscles tighten and then take many hours (the fibro) to stop hurting. So there I was, thinking about pain and each specific area that particularly affects me. My shoulder and lower back were main contenders today so I picked the lower back one (Grumpy Buttock Sciatica) to focus upon. So here goes, this is how it feels:
- local pain over the bottom end of the lumber bits of my back and the top end of the sacral section. This is a general soreness at all times, mostly but sometimes results in sharp intakes of breath.
- thumping, throbbing pain as it enters the performis (deep in to my left buttock). Once in this place it can vary from feeling like you have a bag of rocks in your butt (best) through to feeling like you are being stabbed repeatedly (worst and this is crying level).
- a white hot heat as the sensation heads down the sciatic nerve. This sometimes stops just above my knee to lurk around the bottom of my quads.
- the white hot pain then heads down to my foot where at best it encourages some of my foot to go numb. On bad days it mixes up the numbness with pain in the none numb bits
I would also like to record that this is only a description of the ‘sciatic’ pain. On the left leg there are also issues with my knee (osteoarthritis) and my ankle, again osteoarthritis. However, I will leave the pain (and swelling which contributes to foot numbness) from the osteoarthritis for another day.
I tried to counter act my grumpy butt pain by heading to the sauna (I didn’t have my butt bottle – hot water bottle – with me) but it was far too busy in there so that too made me a little stressed. Although I am sure I still got some benefit from the delicious heat, one of them wasn’t relaxing the relevant muscles. Oh well.
I would also like to record that I then headed over from Derby to Nottingham to attend the first meeting of the book club. We were discussing our best book of 2024 (The Borgia Portrait by David Hewson for me). It was an excellent meeting but the chairs in the club lounge don’t help with Grumpy Buttock Sciatica.