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Pain Management Update, 6/2/2026

I exchanged several texts with Laney last night, who has been checking in with me daily to see how I'm doing, about how my pain level has been relatively consistent each day so far, but actually slightly worse than it had been before. We discussed whether I should call my doctor, and I found my discharge paperwork which had a section on "When to call your doctor":

• Fever of 101° or chills
• Confusion or extreme fatigue
• Increased abdominal pain
• Uncontrolled nausea or vomiting

It was the "increased adbdominal pain" one that seemed tricky to me. Like: increased by how much, though? The pain mostly subsides each time I take the Extra Strength Tylenol, and otherwise the increase in pain was pretty negligible.

Laney was reassured to learn that I had a follow-up appointment booked with my own doctor's office on June 11 before they even discharged me from the hospital. That's Thursday next week. And I told her that if I felt any worse today then I would call my doctor.

So here's where it gets sort of odd. We had discussed the possibility that I had complicated things by sleeping in the wrong position, and Shobhit had suggested getting a side pillow to try preventing me from rolling over on my side in my sleep. We have spare pillows in the guest room closet, so I grabbed one of those, and tried that. It seems to have kind of backfired: this put me in a position that did not quite work, especially with the added weight of Shobhit back in the bed with me (he was in Portland the previous two nights), and I woke up in the middle of the night with new, lower back pain. I threw the pillow on the floor, found a new position as comfortable as I could get while laying on my back, and snoozed for another couple of hours until 5:30 a.m. came along and it was time to get up.

Shobhit asked how I was feeling and I said, "A little worse." The pillow seemed to have made it worse rather than better. On the other hand, the chest pressure and pain wasn't quite as bad as it was yesterday.

And that's the odd part of it. I felt pretty sore getting up and getting around at first, but through the morning, I actually feel overall more noticeably better than yesterday than I think maybe I have since coming home from the hospital! Mind you, I still have to be careful getting up and down and I don't dare sneeze, all that's the same. But overall the low-grade pain seems to be at a lower grade. I'm taking this as a good sign.

And this is even after a moment when I breathed a bit of cereal milk down the wrong pipe, and I had a minor coughing fit, which really hurt the spot where I have the toughest time just under my left ribs—basically where my spleen and part of my liver are at. These were the two organs that got damaged and are in the process of having their internal bleeding reabsorbed into my body. If I have pain in my back while sitting up or sitting down, it's at roughly the same spot as the pain in the front. The back pain I felt when I first got up this morning, and especially when I woke up early this morning, was much lower in my back so I don't know what that's about, but it seems to be okay now.

I still took my morning dose of Tylenol, though. I maybe be doing that three times a week until the week is out. I'm just glad the pain has never gotten to the level where I needed the methocarbamol or oxycodone; I really didn't want to have to take either of those. Yesterday Ivan texted me with the quip, Why aren't you willing to take the Methocarbamol? My patients find it very helpful. He works as a nurse in a drug addiction treatment facility, which means his patients are already coming in as meth addicts.

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There's not much else to tell, really. I spent much of the evening rewatching Catch Me If You Can, which I saw twice in its theatrical release in late 2002 and early 2003, and I have no idea if I've seen it again since. I really enjoyed it, and had been thinking about rewatching that one every once in a while in recent months.

I forgot to mention that on Sunday I finally tried to watch The Beatles: Get Back, the wildly acclaimed documentary on Disney+. It's in three parts, each one of them two and a half to nearly three hours long, and features never-before-seen footage of rehearsals very late in their career. It's been out since 2021 and I only now decided to check it out. Well? I got 45 minutes into the first episode and turned it off. It feels like watching them compose music in real time, which I can see how that might feel extraordinary if you are intimately familiar with their catalog, but I am not. There is no particular narrative arc to it otherwise, so I was bored as hell. I decided I can just take that off my Disney+ watch list.

Shobhit's train ride back from Portland was last night, and his train pulled into King Street Station at about 9:50, about half an hour delayed so that wasn't bad. I was very tired though so I was recently asleep by the time he finally got home. He did spend the day walking around Portland yesterday after having to check out of his hotel, and he sent me lots of pictures; I now have two different photo albums of just Shobhit's visits to Portland, and this one has 29 shots in it.

I was last in Portland when we went there to stay the night for my birthday last year, so I could finally ride the Portland Aerial Tram. For different reasons, Shobhit has already been back to Portland twice since; I have not. I have no idea when I'll be back there again, but it may be another thing to get integrated into one of my Birth Weeks in coming years. If I go with the lighthouses theme I'm currently considering for next year, though, then Portland won't be on the list.

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[posted 12:32pm]