7/13/14. The post where my foot has a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad day.

7/13/14:  my foot felt pretty bad when I went to sleep last night, but I woke up in the middle of the night feeling much worse.  It's a little hard to describe - it was at about an 8, so It was not the worst I've been, but it was spread over a larger part of my foot, so it felt really miserable.  There was no way to get comfortable enough to get back to sleep.  The best position was to hang my foot completely off the bed out of the covers so that nothing was touching it, but even that didn't help very much.  Even the magic cream didn't make a difference. I have no idea what I could have done yesterday to cause it.

And to make matters worse, being awake in the middle of the night reminded me that the Cymbalta makes me nauseous.  The point of taking it at night is that you sleep through the worst of the nausea, but that only works if you are asleep.  So, as you can probably imagine, it was a long night.

This meant that most of my plans for today were out the window.  I stayed in bed most of the morning until hunger/nausea finally encouraged me to stumble down the stairs to get some lunch.  (While it may sound counter-intuitive, eating makes me feel less nauseous.)  I spent much of the afternoon lying on the couch watching the World Cup final game.  I rallied a little in the late afternoon and was able to do some chores and a little cooking.  I would like to have stayed in bed all day, but I know that next weekend will be shot because of my stimulator trial.  No stretching, no bending, no twisting, no lifting more than five pounds.  For a week.  Not sure how that is going to work, but I figured I'd better get as much done today as I could.

Hoping this will disappear as quickly as it appeared and tomorrow will be better.  Regardless, I just have to make it four more days to the stimulator trial. I feel increasingly like Charlie from the novel Flowers for Algernon.  For those of you who have not read it (or seen the movie based on the novel), if you are a serious literary nerd, you can find out more about it here (major spoiler alert): http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flowers_for_Algernon

Otherwise, I will try to give you a short synopsis.  It is a science fiction novel in which Charlie is a man with a lower than average IQ who works as a janitor in a science lab.  The scientists in the lab are conducting a surgical experiment to increase the intelligence of a mouse named Algernon.  It appears to be successful, so they perform the same surgery on Charlie.  His intelligence increases each day and he begins working in the lab with them.  However, they discover that the effects are only temporary and Algernon's intelligence begins to decrease again each day, eventually becoming even lower than it was prior to the surgery.  Charlie begins desperately researching to find the error in the experiment before he meets the same fate as Algernon.

Feeling better for awhile has made it harder to deal with bad days like today.  While I am excited about the stimulator trial, I am trying not to get my hopes up too much.  The stimulator has a 50% success rate and even if it works, it comes with its own set of issues.  I will take it easy for the next few days and see how I do.  I wish there were a Wikipedia synopsis for my story so I could find out how it ends, but I guess I'll just have to wait it out.  And so will you.