Learning is fun, right?

One fortunate aspect of my life is that so many of my experiences, including jobs, have included an education. I like that. From employment as a math tutor, driving instructor, or fake engineer with an English degree, to rebuilding a car engine or constructing the shelter I now call home, I've often benefited from entering an occupation of my time with little experience. That allowed for lots and lots and lots and maybe even one more lot of educational growth. Learning is fun!

Yesterday I learned the results of my Wednesday ankle MRI. They weren't especially good, but I'm sure they could've been more dire, or, to use my line ever since being hit by the car in 2022, "I hope I can always say: I've been worse." When I rolled my ankle running last August, apparently the tearing noise I heard was a ligament, and the sprain has been described as "high level", although having finally searched "high level sprain", it seems that was simply the nurse's phrasing for pretty bad. Oops.

But even not-so-good knowledge is better than not knowing, and with it, the team of medical support workers and I have started progressing in our plans for repair. While physical therapy was in no way hurting, it often felt, sometimes painfully, like treating the symptoms without directly repairing the root cause of my problems, so I will be switching to sports therapy. What's the difference? From what I've learned, I'd say sports therapy is physical therapy on steroids, except I'm not at all comfortable with that metaphor in the context of sport. Ick!

In addition to learning about just how much I goofed in putting one foot in front of the other, I'm also learning about pain medication. Like, I suspect, many athletes, I have a somewhat distant relationship to the perception of pain. This can be a performance advantage when pushing one's body past the safe zone of loping lackadaisically, also known as racing. For reference, I equated the experience of a colonoscopy without anaesthetic to feeling as painful as a cyclocross race, but fifteen minutes shorter! I'm not a tough guy, but it seems my body doesn't perceive pain as acutely as most.

Pain is a survival advantage. People, especially males, with CIP have a lower life expectancy because their bodies don't make the damage they're receiving painfully problematic. Hitting one's thumb with a hammer is supposed to be a lesson to avoid doing that in the future. Racers' bodies, however, need to partially ignore discomfort, or they wouldn't be as effective at racing. After the ACDF surgery last year, I was prescribed narcotic pain killers, and my friend and post-op steward Adele, when asking out of concern that I would ride a bike too soon, was told I'd be in too much pain for a week to even try.

I took a grand total of none of the narcotics, using just one 500mg acetaminophen cut into two doses to prophylactically make sure pain didn't prevent me sleeping the first night, and two days later I rode the four miles to the bus stop as a much faster option than walking. No, I'm not tough. I just didn't feel much hurt. My right leg of late, however, now that hurts. Sleep being is when the body best repairs, so when the pain was keeping me awake two nights ago, I did some quick reading and opted to put a full 500mg dose of acetaminophen in my empty stomach. It worked! I slept, and that may deserve credit for why I felt better the next day even after the pain reliever was no longer working.

Not often experiencing pain, I didn't know much about pain medication, although years ago my friend Brendan had mentioned learning to take ibuprofen for injuries as it reduces swelling and that speeds recovery. My reading this morning supported that and told me the acetaminophen I'd taken, while successful at blocking pain reception, didn't function to help with swelling at the source of the pain like ibuprofen, aspirin, or naproxen could. Okay, when the pain started to build, I tried 200mg of the ibuprofen I had in the house.

Another aspect of not perceiving pain much, the ibuprofen I had expired in 2021, and no, I don't remember how I sourced it. Medications lose effectiveness over time and it seems four years was ample time to complete that degredation. The ibuprofen had no perceptible effect, so after a couple hours that included reading about mixing medications, I opted for 81mg of aspirin to take advantage of any swelling reduction at the source of the pain it could offer. I had that aspirin remaining from from 2022 as part of a regimen to protect against clotting post accident, and it had expired a mere year and a half ago! I figured expired, ineffective ibuprofen and low dosage aspirin was not likely a dangerous combination of nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs.

RICE

Rest, ice, compression, elevation

Three out of four ain't bad.

It worked, and my legs hurts significantly less now. Yay, and yay again. Yes, this is knowledge I'd prefer to not need to know, but even on my need-to-know basis, I'm happy to learn something. I'm also happy my body is perceptive enough to feel pain, even if I'm not enjoying it at the moment. Masochism is overrated.