— छह हज़ार पैंतीस —

Why don't we start today by talking about pain management?

I was sent home from the hospital last Thursday with two prescriptions: one for methocarbamol, and one for oxycodone. One is fast-acting and one takes effect over time; I don't remember at all which is which. I only went ahead and had them write the prescriptions as a precaution, in case I found myself in excruciating pain again, but barring that I had no intention of taking either of them. And I haven't. I also bought a bottle of Extra Strength Tylenol, and I have been taking that quite consistently the whole time since I got home—two tablets no more frequently than every six hours, but with no more than six tablets in any 24-hour period. I've basically fallen into the routine of taking a couple right after getting out of bed in the morning; another couple around 1 or 2:00 in the afternoon; and another couple shortly before bed. For the most part, the Tylenol is doing the trick.

That is, as long as I am careful with my movements. Getting up and down from a sitting position, for example, was pretty difficult the first couple of days. I still have to be careful now but it's not quite as bad. Where it hurts most seems to rotate to different spots in my body—just as it did during the 48 hours I was in the hospital.

It also, to a degree, depends on where I have put any kind of strain on my body. The most acute example of this seems to be driving. Alexia came to watch movies and then stay the night Saturday night, and so I moved the car to allow her to park in our spot, since as residents we have free "Zone 4" street parking and she does not. I found a spot all of two blocks away, that's the whole distance I drove the car on Saturday, but there's something about how steering pulls at the muscles of my back, it fucked me up. We went to a movie yesterday, and she suggested we just swap her car into where I had parked so I could move my car back. She had offered to drive my car back for me, but I still needed to get into the car and take it out of the spot so she could park. And since it wasn't hurting the same way as it did the day before, I told her I thought I was okay to drive the car back.

This was evidently a mistake. I really did feel okay driving the two blocks back to my garage, but then the similar back pain returned and kind of didn't go away for the rest of the day. It lessened signifcantly after I took my mid-day Tylenol, but it gradually got worse until I could take my Tylenol in the evening.

This may or may not be related, but after a couple of days waking up with a bit less pain than I'd had the day before, this morning I woke up with a bit more. I still don't regret convincing Shobhit to take that trip to Portland, but he was clearly hoping I would be feeling well enough to go pick him up at the train station when the train arrives tonight at 9:20—that's assuming the tain is even on time, of course (it looks like this train originates from Portland, so that helps; but even his southbound train was delayed 25 minutes due to how Amtrak has to give right-of-way to freight tains using the same tracks). After my experiences driving all of two blocks at a time the past couple of days, he's going to have to get himself home tonight. I may very well be asleep by the time he gets here, but it also won't take all that long to get home from King Street Station anyway.

I do find myself thinking about whether it's better to have brief pain that is excruciating, or moderate or minor pain that is steady and indefinite. I'm actually leaning toward the former. At least it's over relatively quickly. This low-grade pain lasting for days on end is certainly no picnic, especially with how it can intensify if I just move the wrong way. It was explained to me that the body is signalling to me that something weird is going on with the blood in there from internal bleeding and that's a source of the pain. They also said that it would take the body one to two weeks to reabsorb the blood. Tomorrow will be one week since the accident, so I'm hoping the pain will be noticeably improved, if not gone, by the end of this week.

I'm officially back to work this week, but working from home as the final doctor who spoke to me recommended. The way she put it, specifically, was, "You should work from home for at least a week, if you can." I immediately decided that yes, that's what I would do. I've talked a lot ever since the pandemic about how much I prefer to work in-office, and I am one of only a couple of people who do so full time by default. But this is clearly a special circumstance, and it's been very clear since yesterday that it was the best choice for this week to work from home. It would be too painful trying to get to and from the office, even as close as it is (1.4 miles). At home I can rest however and whenever I need.

Gabby messaged me over Teams not long after she evidently saw me signed in and active. She asked how I was feeling, and I was honest about it: still managing pain, but at least it's a fraction of what I dealt with last week. She responded: If there's anything I can do to support this week while you catch up / work from home, let me know. Try to take it easy and take time for breaks (water, fresh air, moving around a little bit, etc.)

I do not take for granted, nor have I ever, the kind of support I have always gotten at PCC, but especially from Gabby.

— छह हज़ार पैंतीस —

— छह हज़ार पैंतीस —

I guess I can be more specific now about Alexia's visit. The original plan was for us to have a double feature in the theater downstairs, but not only do I not know if it's working properly yet, but I knew I wasn't going to want to sit down there for four hours. Alexia was totally fine, of course, with watching the movies in the condo instead.

I also gave her the option of coming later than the originally planned time of noon, since her plan now was to spend the night. She asked to push it out to 2:00 and that was fine. It did mean I was alone here from around 7 a.m. Saturday until that time, but I was okay; this is something Gabriel in particular kept worrying about. Alexia must have left around 3:30 yesterday, and I had the rest of the day here to myself, and have all day to myself today too. I don't regard it as this "big risk" the way Gabriel seems to, and it's actually kind of nice. When I need to take it easy, some peace and quiet isn't so bad.

Anyway, she texted me she was "running a little late," which I later found a bit comical because she still arrive by a quarter after 2:00. We got here into the parking space in our garage, she came upstairs, we chatted for a bit, and begore long we were watching the two romantic comedies we had planned: When Harry Met Sally..., which I had to buy for five and a half bucks on Apple (the cheapest place I could find it); and Four Weddings and a Funeral, which I managed to find on Hoopla, the streamer that can be used via your library card—I was delighted to find that I could install a Hoopla app on our LG Smart TV. Alexia even wrote down the name of the app, as she had never heard of it.

We did order takeout from Aviv Hummus Bar, a favorite restaurant of hers up the street on 15th, in between the movies. She recommended a kind of pita sandwich called the "Pita Sabich," which I had never gotten there before because I always want falafel, but I decided to try something new this time. Their prices have gone up significantly, with taxes and an automatic gratutity, for just the one item I ordered, it came to $22.55, which is very tempting to call ridiculous except that I fully support the raising of minimum wage here, and this kind of thing was one of the expected results. The only thing is that I didn't budget for this, but I did not want to ask Alexia to just eat leftover beans and rice with me, nor did I want to run the risk of making her feel bad or feel obligated to buy it for me. I budget in a way that makes it easy to accommodate unexpected expenses like this anyway. She did just have yogurt and cereal for breakfast yesterday, although she still went to Bakery Nouveau for a croissant sandwich by 11 a.m. She mentioned that she eats five times as much as all of her friends, and she doesn't really gain weight because she exercises a lot, doesn't really have a thing for sweets (she'll make a ton of cookies, but then give them all to me), and typically eats mostly high-protein foods.

I did opt to walk over there with her, as it's just a few blocks, and the doctors did want me moving around. I think maybe there's something about the sandals I wore, just walking on pavement did not have very much cushion to my steps, and that alone exacerbated some of my abdominal pains. I still have to be so careful with any of my movements, it's ridiculous and frustrating.

Alexia had said she'd be open to even watching a third movie, but by the time we were done with the second, it was 7:30, and I knew it would be late for her by the time it was done. Plus, I actually had already watched three movies by that point, as I killed time in the morning after Shobhit left on Saturday by rewatching Flee, my favorite movie I saw in 2022, and the kind of movie I know Alexia would never go for. She likes her movie to be escapist entertainment, not heavy and depressing. So, eventually we just hung out together in the living room, as she brought a book to read and I sort of farted around on my laptop.

We did go to a movie yesterday, though: The Mandalorian and Grogu, which was had originally planned to see on Tuesday but that was the day I went to the hospital. I had another movie I had planned to see on my own and review Friday evening but I scrapped that, opting instead to stay home and take it easy. Aside from things like the walk to Aviv or driving the car two blocks, the movie yesterday was my first legit outing since coming home.

Well, I take that back. In the hour before the movie, Alexia drove me down to Rainier Square to pick up my bike, where my bike had been left and locked to a bike rack since the accident on Tuesday. Shobhit and I had already talked about how we would get my bike home, because riding it was clearly out of the question, and even walking it up the hill right now would fuck me up. Shobhit at first suggested we take it home in his car, not realizing that the only way my bike fits in his car is if I remove the front wheel of the bike—I don't want to be dealing with that shit. We settled on maybe taking the bus down there, and then taking the bike onto a bus back.

But then it occurred to us to see if there was space in Alexia's much larger car. I told her we could forget it if it proved too complicated, but she totally did this for me. She had boxes of books from a close friend who recently passed away in her hatcback, which she temporarily took out and stacked in the parking space; there were about four of them. She lowered her back seats, and removed a bar thing with a slide-out cover that goes over the hatchback space when that door is closed. We then drove down to Rainier Square, parked right outside the parking garage entrance which was helpfully open, and we went down to get the bike.

I unlocked the bike and re-locked the chain around the frame, but Alexia pushed the bike up the ramp for me to the car, and even hefted the bike into her car for me. I felt bad being unable to help with any of that, but immensely grateful at all the trouble she was saving Shobhit and me later. We then drove it back to my garage, and she took the bike back out for me and I locked it up in its usual spot, where I lock it to a small metal ring stuck to the concrete wall at the back of the parking space. She put the boxes back in her car and resituated all that and it was all done.

Under normal circumstances we would have walked to the theater, which is about a mile away, but I totally took her up on the offer to drive us there and back, even though it meant paying for parking (which she typically does when she meets me at Pacific Place for a movie these days anyway).

Alexia really did a lot for me over the weekend—and for Shobhit: she watered his p=patch plots so I wouldn't have to. She's leaving on a trip to Oregon with friends today so she went home soon after we got back from the movie yesterday, which, as I already noted, left me here on my own for the rest of the day. It was fine, even though Gabriel called me as I was getting ready for bed, and had me on speaker so Lea could hear me. He asked how I was feeling and I said, "I'm okay." Lea, in a tone suggesting she felt she knew the answer, said, "Matthew, are you in pain?"

I was, but not in excruciating pain. Gabriel's a little hung up on my being left alone at all, and he even said, "I'll drive up there right now!" That was absolutely unnecessary, and as I said to him later when he said again that he would do that, "You would probably just annoy me." That made him laugh, although it was actually true. It was genuinely sweet of him to be that concerned, but also: neither his nor Shobhit's presence alone would be any kind of pain killer, so I don't really see what the difference is. I'm not incapacitated and I truly don't think it's any huge risk or danger for me to be here by myself for a day. In fact I kind of like it.

I did do some other catching up with friends whom I had yet to tell what happened. I didn't even text Ivan what happened until after I was home on Thursday; I finally texted Jennifer about it on Saturday; and when I mentioned it over text to Claudia last night, she did a very rare thing and called me back, so I spent a good amount of time giving her the whole story verbally. Gabriel and Laney in particular have been checking with me every day, and Danielle not quite as frequently but nearly as much; she has long shifts at her nursing job and has been busy.

One upside to Shobhit's absence is I opened a package of veggie hot dogs I've had for a while and have been having a veggie hot dog for lunch every day since Saturday. I'm enjoying that, at least! I just finished eating one, and so far it's one of the highlights of my day.

— छह हज़ार पैंतीस —

[posted 12:24pm]