I toss toddlers as a pastime and I garden. I thought it was just my shoulder acting up like it did last year about this time. I eventually had to have an injection to settle it down but we were going to be away for a week. No garden to tend, no toddlers to toss. Take naproxen, give it a rest, see if it wouldn't just ease off on its own.

It wouldn't.

Last night was the first time in three weeks that I have slept eight straight hours. The first two of those weeks the pain kept me awake or woke me up. This past week I was up until the 1AM pill kicked in. I didn't need a pill at 1AM today. But I needed the 5AM and the 9AM.

What I am feeling is a combination of a constant "arm-is-asleep" sensation and being hit on my left shoulder by a baseball bat every few minutes. This is an improvement from a week ago in that the bat used to be a 16 pound sledge and the "tigers-chewing-arm-off" sensation no longer occurs with every cough, sneeze and swallow.

I do not know what this punishment is for - there are myriad possibilities. But, it is being visited upon me by way of an impingment of the cervical spine nerve root at C5/6 by a herniated vertebral disc. In the vernacular, a pinched nerve in my neck. In the vulgar, a F^$^#ing pinched nerve in my neck.

The initial treatment for this gem of a condition is steroids for a week and hydrocodone for the sheer joy of it. Steroids help by reducing the irritation caused by the pressure caused by the swelling caused by the inflamation induced in nerve root by the disc. Hydrocodone helps by making one feel so crappy that one forgets about the pain.

Hydrocodone is an opiate of the poppy. I have never done well with any by-product of the genus Papaver. I can't even get P. orientalis to grow in my garden. And it's a wildflower! For starters, opiates slow time. In the long-run perhaps I won't age as fast but in real time everything seems to move slowly and last forever. It is a very disorienting perception. I am uncoordinated anyway, opiates compound that in me. I think I have had to re-type every word in this entry at least once because I hit the wrong key or multiple keys. Opiates eliminate every ounce of motivation and every gram of joy. Why anyone would take this stuff "recreationally" totally escapes my understanding.

The worst thing that opiates do to me is that they make me stupider. For instance, I currently believe that somebody might be interested in reading this piece and that it is marginally entertaining beyond its Schadenfreude-inducing potential. I've posted some fairly cryptic stuff lately and sent not a few PMs that have seemed to me to be possesed of crystalline truth only to receive the response, "Huh?" And rightfully so.

And then, after two more weeks of this crap, it's a coin-flip on whether I'll need surgery.

For an experience far more interesting than being narcotized, Wiki on "Miltown" (one "L").