As expected this last week hasn’t been great. On at least two days I’ve been tempted to try to walk home from work because it’s been too painful to sit in the car going over even the slightest of bumps. Evenings are definitely the worst and consequently I’ve had some rough nights.
On the plus side, having the day off yesterday and a very persuasive wife got me back in the pool for the first time since I was having hydrotherapy nearly 18 months ago. Getting into the pool was fairly horrible. I used my stick to get from the changing room to the shared lockers, so Cat could then hold onto me as I made my way to the pool, but even so I did not enjoy walking on the damp tiled floor in bare feet. Once in the pool I did a few exercises and then tried a few tentative strokes. I was pleasantly surprised at how doing breaststroke didn’t seem to add to my normal back pain, and eventually did half a dozen lengths – slowly. I then tried a few times up and down the shallower part doing the strides I was taught in hydrotherapy. I used a lane marker to try to keep straight, but still found myself wobbling around quite a bit. Even so, I was pretty pleased with how I’d got on, and feel enthused to start doing it more regularly.
Probably the worst thing I could do having been and done some new exercise was to go home and decide to put a new light in the loft. It’s a little precarious in our loft, with seemingly differing gaps between joists to balance between, and limited headroom where I needed to run the cable around the water tank etc, so by the time I’d been up there for a couple of hours (doing what should’ve taken no more than about 45 minutes), I was in a pretty bad state. I’m therefore more than a little surprised that I wasn’t aching in even more places than normal this morning. I can’t say I’ve been trouble free today, but given yesterday’s exploits I can’t really complain. Yesterday was also the first day without any amitriptyline, and a reduction by a third of my gabapentin dose.