I am so relieved to be done with medical procedures, for a while at least. 🙂 The last couple of weeks have been quite a medical journey. I’m glad my sister was in town when I found out about Angle-Closure Glaucoma and had the epidural for my neck done or I would have gone crazy with anxiety and stress. Thanks Grech. Just having her here distracted me enough to not be constantly worried about what I was going through.
I had the Laser Iridotomy on my left eye yesterday and while it was pretty uncomfortable – the zapping of the lasers in my eyeball and all, I feel better today than I did the day after they did the right eye last week. I had an intense headache after the Laser Iridotomy yesterday and slept for a couple of hours.. something I don’t do in the middle of the day hardly ever. Madelyn asked if the eye surgery was going to take the purpleness out from under my eyes. Anyone care to recommend an amazing under-eye concealer?
Today I’m struggling with whether or not the epidural (technically referred to as a Medial Branch Block) I had almost two weeks ago, worked. I HATE to think it didn’t work, but my neck really hurt yesterday. I was hoping the pain was a result of the stress and anxiety over the Laser Iridotomy I was getting ready for yesterday afternoon, but my neck still hurts today. I am going to give it a few more days and will call my physical therapist to schedule a dry needling or trigger point massage session if the pain isn’t substantially better by Friday. The spine surgeon said that if the Medial Branch Block worked this time we would go with Radiofrequency Neurotomy next time which would relieve the pain forever, since a heat lesion is created on the nerves with the goal of interrupting the pain signals to the brain, thus eliminating pain. Sounds great right.. but I have to feel definite relief from the Medial Branch Block in order to move to the next step so I’m a little frustrated that I might not be getting that relief, putting us back to (almost) square one as far as a treatment plan is concerned.
Meanwhile, I’m excited to be going to my 4th private yoga therapy session tomorrow. Carolyn, my yoga teacher, has not only taught me yoga poses and stretches that help with my neck pain but she’s also taught me breathing techniques that help with pain and stress. Nowadays, there’s a good chance my kids will walk into my office and see me with my eyes closed, on the floor, breathing slowly and deeply, unbeknownst to them, creating a happier more relaxed mom. For the last two weeks I’ve been practicing the pigeon and warrior poses so hopefully I can pull them off without falling on my face tomorrow. I just realized I can’t drive myself to yoga tomorrow. Shoot.. I guess I need to stop writing and figure out how I’m going to get to yoga tomorrow.
To the right is the photo I chose for how I’m feeling today.
Even though things aren’t always the way we’d like them to be, it’ll work out if you do your best and make the best of the situation.
It wasn’t an ideal situation but Sebastian parked his bike in this flooded bike rack, it did the job and turned out to be just fine. 🙂
That’s it for today.
I have updates on the dog situation and organization around the house that I’m excited to share in another post so stay tuned. 🙂
– Alicia
Note to readers: When I write posts like this (personal posts), I often don’t proofread it because I will then edit and delete for hours or never actually publish the post. Run-on sentence and grammatical errors are to be expected. 
