Hi again. Been a while. I still can't use my arms and wrists comfortably even after almost 2 months. Fuck this medical system. Here's the latest news:

Apr 17 - EMG nerve conduction

So, I had a nerve conduction test, or I was supposed to at least. When we started the test, something went wrong. I'm supposed to receive electric shocks through my arm that help the doctor see how well my nerves are working, but on the lowest setting it was unbearably painful. I screamed. You might be thinking I could try again, but I knew immediately: if this is the lowest setting, I can't go any further. The doctor said, if I continued, we would need to up the strength to at least 20 times as strong. No. No way.

I walked out. Surprisingly, they refunded the cost. I immediately called the spine surgeon who had ordered this test done in the first place. His assistant picked up and I talked to her. I told her what had happened and that I did not know if my neck injections were scheduled yet. She said for the injections, I had an appointment on Monday, and for the nerve conduction test, she does not know what to do and she will talk to the doctor and call me back.

After I made it home, the tingling sensation from the shock was still traveling through my arm. For the rest of the day, I felt this electricity sensation in my wrist and fingers. I had to avoid using the arm. It was mostly tolerable as long as I ignored it. But at 4 AM that night, suddenly, the pain amplified so much. Every time the nerves in my wrist pulsated, I felt the same pain I did when I was electrocuted in the lab. It repeated over and over for an hour. I tried grounding myself by touching metal, by using an electrostatic wristband, by rubbing water on it. Nothing helped. For some reason, after making a desperate post on Reddit, I discovered if I pushed through the pain and popped all my joints from the shoulder to the wrist, the pain subsided. Finally, I went to sleep.

Apr 21 - Pain clinic

When I went to the pain clinic, something was wrong right away. When I talked to the receptionist, she gave me forms for my first time in the pain clinic. They asked me basic information they should already know. When I asked about it, the receptionist said, there are no injections today, this is just an initial visit. Ugh. So already, time being wasted. But the real doozy is what happened when I went back for my visit.

I talked to the pain doctor. I explained that I have herniated discs in my neck that need to be treated and I have fibromyalgia as well. For some reason he immediately ignored the herniated discs. He dismissed them as not being severe enough to cause problems. Not important. He instead focused on the fibromyalgia. And then he asked me if I had tried Tai Chi.

I was fucking floored. Appalled. Well, I told him that I did indeed try Tai Chi. I told him I did with my mom many years ago with a home instructional video. This is only a partial lie. I have previously done yoga, exercise, stretches, whatever you can think of. Not Tai Chi though. I further explained to him that all exercise and stretching aggravates my fibromyalgia and makes my pain flare up. I did not believe this would be effective. He insisted that despite all of the difficulty of fibromyalgia, this is the one thing that works the most. The nurse started talking to me condescendingly, saying I "need to stop expecting a magic treatment from doctors and put in effort".

Needless to say, I was beside myself with disappointment, upset, rage. I did manage to worm out something, though. I convinced them to do something called trigger point injections, two days later.

Apr 23 - Trigger point injections

So I went in for trigger point injections. The process is very easy. The doctor pushes on my neck and shoulders until I reflexively jump and yelp in pain. He takes note of this spot, numbs it, and then injects a numbing agent. He repeated this about 12 times.

Immediately after the injections, I noticed that I could rotate my head all the way to each side and look straight up. I have not been able to do these in decades. My neck and shoulders have always been so incredibly tense that I could never even do that. I was excited. I thought I had made a huge leap.

Well, another thing I noticed was I could rotate my arms and shoulders all the way around. I made some quick circles with my arms. Somehow I got the idea in my head that I had some kind of temporary fix to my arm problems. I thought maybe the injections helped because the problem was actually my shoulders. And so that day, I went home and went straight on the PC.

Finally being on the PC after all this time was cathartic. Incredible. It was beautiful. I spent about 4-5 hours just catching up doing programming, fixing bugs on this very website, doing the kind of things that I missed. But something was wrong. I got the sinking feeling in my gut that I was running out of time. And sure enough, no matter how many breaks I took, no matter how much water I drank, no matter how many stretches I did, my arms, shoulders, and elbows were getting tighter, tenser, more pained the more I used the PC.

I ended up right back where I started, stuck in my bed on my phone. But this time, my arms, elbows, shoulders, and so on, were in so much more pain than usual. I had overused them. It turns out the trigger point injections did nothing to help my arms or ulnar nerve syndrome. That is still a very real problem. And so no progress has been made.

Apr 24 - Today

Today, one week after the nerve conduction test went wrong, I called the spine surgeon's office again. I got a different voice than before, I believe. I explained the situation: that the spine surgeon had ordered a nerve conduction test, a week ago it failed, and the pain management doctor had ordered trigger point injections instead of treating my herniated discs.

She told me that the spine surgeon wanted to get the nerve conduction test done and could not continue without it. She told me she would tell him the test had failed and call me back with more news. This is the second time I've heard this now. I haven't got a single call back yet.

Also, remember all that incredible relief I felt the day before when I got those trigger point injections? It's gone. I don't know how. I don't know why. My neck and shoulders are back to exactly the way they were before the injections. It's as if it never happened. I do not even think this is from the PC. I think this is just some fact of my life.