¿Se duele la cuello? Lo siento. ¿A lo major debarias ir a un medico?

¡Me da pánico!

¿Es este el hilo de comentarios en español?

It's not likely something to be concerned about heebie. There's a lot of traffic in the neck and you probably spend too much time on your phone like everyone these days. PT will sort out the tingling.

We got a new couch last year, which is good because the old one was in terrible shape, but the new one hurts my left hip. Not entirely sure why. Perhaps it's too deep. Perhaps it's something about the material, I've never really been able to deal with memory foam, I hate memory foam beds, so maybe that's what's going on?

Also I have two pairs of Blundstones that are the same size but slightly different models, and for whatever reason on one of them the left foot is too tight at the top, which causes weird pains in my big toe. This is fun because I had weird pains in my big toe when I lived in NY so maybe it explains what's going on, but also frustrating because I keep hoping the leather will stretch out just enough to make it ok. They're totally fine for standing or walking in, but sitting down moves the foot up slightly enough that they're not comfortable to sit in.

I also have a minor medical mystery, which is that I had a routine colonoscopy, and I had "active ileitis" near my "ileocecal valve." This doesn't seem concerning enough for anyone to want to do any kind of follow-up with me, but it makes me curious. I have IBS, so I keep wondering whether this is some clue to what's really going on with that.

That was me.

My feet and ankles hurt when I first get out of bed. I'm not even running lately, and I just feel - as old as I am - I'm too young for this!

The first steps going downstairs in the morning are painful and awkward.

X-rays showed I had a bone spur under my kneecap that actually had me on crutches for a while last year, then afterward would occasionally catch while I was walking and I'd have to manually adjust my kneecap before I could take another step. The doctor said it would require surgery to go in and shave it down. But instead, in a repeat of the resolution of similar knee problems I had about a decade ago, I fell after stepping in a hole in the yard, and must have broken off the bone spur because the knee has been totally fine ever since.

And now it's floating around?

that is some ridiculously good luck.

Last month we took Friday off for a long weekend in San Francisco. Instead, Thursday night I strained/sprained my neck and spent the next three days in bed staring at the ceiling and "lifting" my head with my hands every time I changed position - which was rare. (We missed the concert and had to cancel the hotel - there was no way to drive, even as a passenger.) I was able to sit up for a few hours each day, but quickly tired and went back to bed to the one position that didn't hurt. Weeks later, there are still positions that my neck won't go without careful thought. So... yeah, not a fan of random stabs of pain for aging.

Also, it turns out that my younger brother turns 50 today!!!

I had a bout of COVID last spring which is still lingering: asthma symptoms, managed with a preventative inhaler, and a general loss of fitness. If I don't regularly exercise and move a fair bit, I get chronic lower body pains: sciatica, ankle and knee pain, etc.

The asthma style symptoms have eased enough that I've been regularly walking for fitness--I walk a lot generally, but this is fast intentional walking for an hour or more--and have started back cycling regularly, which was my main form of cardio. Both are going quite well, and pains are also easing a little, resting heart rate is already dropping. I hope to be back to something close to full cardio fitness by end of July, I guess. I'm leaving it another few weeks before I start easing back into lifting, which I expect will take longer to get back to full strength.

4,5: You found b12 helpful, right? Could it be inflammatory? IBD, not IBS?

One of the geebies recently came back as prediabetic on some labwork. This came as a shock - I thought we'd avoided the worst excesses of Being American insofar as we cook at home, and kids have the protection of being active kids. But it is also true that this kid is the least likely to leave the house and also has significant food aversions that lead them to avoid our cooking and forage for processed food. Still, it was a shock. Visually, to me, the kid looks like the middle part of the normal weight distribution, maybe on the heavier side of normal. Anyway, the geeblet is also upset and overwhelmed by this, and we're encouraging small sustainable habit changes.

That reminds me of the time my ballet teacher went CRACK with a noise you could hear across the studio, stopped what she was doing and did a beautiful cambré, before saying that she hadn't been able to do that for five years.

That's a long time to hold in a fart.

There is a graffiti artist in London whose tag reads: I FARTED IN YOGA.

Someone near me keeps tagging "Inner-city Cryptid." It would be impossible to figure out who it is if it isn't the guy with the Jeep that has a sign about Bigfoot watching.

I spent the fall and winter being nearly incapacitated by mysterious hip pain. Eventually I got diagnosed with arthritis and a misshapen femoral head. Steroid injections have improved things drastically but haven't been lasting as long as they're supposed to and now my stupid ortho guy is talking about a hip replacement.

also all my bug bites are turning into deep bruises for no discernible reason.

13: Yeah, IBD seems like an obvious possibility! I did ask "what if the B12 is related to the IBS" and the NP was like "well that could be Crohn's, let's do some tests." The blood work came back as more inflammation than a normal person but less than someone with Crohn's, and they did a upper endoscopy (end of the stomach top of the small bowel slightly inflamed but not Crohns) and then a small bowel followthrough that was normal, so then dropped it. But this result makes me wonder if they missed something! Like, IBS is a diagnosis of exclusion, and you're not supposed to have inflammation.

The other thing is I did test positive for alpha gal antibodies, so some kind of gut autoimmune reaction to animal products is another possibility.

Probably TMI, but the other interesting medical mystery from the colonoscopy is that it took 7 hours and two full bottles of miralax/gatorade prep before any movement, which is pretty wildly outside of the normal one or two hours. I kinda think my gut has ADHD and just kinda forgets to digest half the day.

14: I was prediabetic on some labwork last year. At the same time, I was frustrated that I felt slow playing when I took up ultimate frisbee, and frustrated that I was getting into clothes and if you're short it's hard to find clothes that fit unless you're also skinny, so I decided to try to lose some weight to see if it helped on all three fronts. This has been surprisingly successful, I think the key point is that I wasn't already low-key watching my diet in any way so there was a lot of low-hanging fruit (though cutting back on beer isn't going to be helpful advice for a kid). I've dropped 30 pounds at a rate of one pound a week. It's fixed the labs, definitely helped with the slowness, and has helped a little with the clothes (though less than I'd hoped, somehow even though I'm the same weight I was in college now, it's definitely not distributed in the same way it was then!).

that is some ridiculously good luck.

I think it's happened twice now, so apparently my knee just resets like that. The first time wasn't causing bad pain, just soreness and an uncool Velcro noise. I also have strange bony growths (tori) on both sides of my bottom jaw, but on the outside rather than the inside where they would occur on almost everybody else with them. Dentist says that maybe I clench my teeth when I sleep (since they don't show signs of grinding), causing extra bone to develop in response. A couple times a sharp point has actually broken through the gum (not actually that painful but sore) but then broken off and the gum grown back over it without any further problem. Dentist's theory is that enough bone forms that it can't get blood to feed it so dies and chips off.

I'm a medical oddity, but also weirdly free of medical history. I'll turn 57 this year with no chronic conditions, no allergies, no medications, no surgeries other than a tonsillectomy at 3 and wisdom teeth removal in my 30s, no broken bones other than the little toe on each foot, and all normal labs other than slightly high cholesterol. I sleep ~5 hours a night, eat at random, don't really exercise other than pacing and fidgeting, and spend most of every day swimming in a high-dose caffeine-nicotine-THC cocktail. Go figure.

Unrelatedly, I got my visa processed for Mexico and just have to go down for a month or two before the end of the year to trade it for my temporary residency card.

(though cutting back on beer isn't going to be helpful advice for a kid)

Quite the contrary. Kids shouldn't be drinking very much beer at all.

I have a musculoskeletal infirmity story that isn't as good as apo's, but is also peculiar and also has a happy ending.

I spent four months in miserable back pain. I couldn't sleep more than two hours at a time, spent money on special pillows and other objects that did no good, and visited several doctors and a physical therapist.

I was eventually doing literally two hours a day of physical therapy exercises. I'd do my exercises on the train on the way to and from work, and spend an hour or so at the office doing things like staring out the window with my neck turned a certain way. (People mistook this for deep rumination.)

I was originally diagnosed with a neck problem (which I do have, but is no big deal) and was sent to a guy who specialized in neck/shoulder stuff. He did another MRI and had no useful advice, ultimately giving up and sending me for drugs to a pain specialist who couldn't see me for several weeks. Just give me the damn drugs!

In the meantime, the Missus insisted that I talk to another doctor, and I got a referral to a spine specialist. I got two more MRIs, this time looking lower down on my spine. I scheduled a video call with him to get the results, but he had his admin staffer call me to bump the call up a couple of hours -- not to accommodate the doctor's schedule, but because he wanted to talk to me as soon as possible.

He had one question that he repeated at least five times (I started counting): What is your date of birth? He told me he couldn't believe that the person with this MRI was actually at work and sitting in a chair. (Physical therapy, folks. It works!)

He told me that I had an infection in my spine, and that I needed to go to an emergency room right now.

So I went, and in the next week in the hospital I interacted with something like seven different doctors. They all wanted to know: Was I an intravenous drug user? (No.) Was I recently in a car accident or victim of some other trauma? (No.) They were skeptical. Apparently, this is not a thing that just happens to people.

The biopsy was awesome! I think it relieved some pressure from my spine or something, because I immediately felt much better when I woke up.

Absent drugs or trauma, nobody could explain how I acquired this infection. The infectious disease guy theorized that this might be tuberculosis that I picked up on a trip to Africa 30 years ago -- that's the degree to which he was groping for a plausible explanation. Ultimately, it turned out to be the most ordinary thing in the world: A staph infection that, if it had broken loose into the rest of my body, could have been fatal.

I'm finally back to where I can run a bit -- where the problem is that I'm old and fat and out of shape, and not that my back prohibits it. There's real joy in something like painlessly sprinting for a train. I almost look forward to the opportunity.

Holy shit.

Wow.

I'm pretty sure that's not a new story. Or I know two people with that?

I was really stuck on him needing to confirm your birthday as pivotal for the diagnosis, for way too long. Like there was a whole batch of babies on this one day with spinal mysteries?!

That's wild. I love a medical mystery, especially when they actually solve it.

Googling a little reminded me of this fun thing where there's medical journal articles that are just like "here's a weird thing that happened, let's just describe it in detail" which is just a very different kind of paper than you usually see in science. In particular, ran across this paper https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC5174821/ which is presumably not quite the same thing that happened to you.

Unfoggetarian you should email me.

27. I was trying to remember if I've told that story here before. Maybe an abbreviated version? If so, it's nice to know that somebody out there reads my comments.

28. I was wondering if that required explanation. He couldn't believe that he was looking at the right MRI and needed to confirm repeatedly. He told me they'd probably want to do an x-ray at the hospital, and maybe a CAT scan. They did both of those and an MRI. I don't think they could believe it either.

OT: Walmart doesn't have greeters anymore?