Not a Mockumentary

 Lately I've posted several times about my physical struggles (when exactly does self-reflection simply turn into whining?; I think the answer can be found on this blog). Last week I went in for an epidural, which was not pleasant but hardly horrible. When I sat down to talk to the spinal specialist I told her I had a few questions, the first, and main, one being, "Why are we doing this?" When she and I had talked earlier she told me that she didn't think my spinal canal stenosis was bad enough to explain my mystery symptoms, essentially meaning that my problems were in the nervous system itself as compared to being more purely structural. If they were structural, then the epidural made more sense, but if it was located in the nervous system then they would treat it with an anti-convulsive med (which they are, and which is making me more than a tad loopy). So, I was surprised when I got the call from her office scheduling an epidural, which is what prompted my question. She told me that she wasn't really sure the epidural would help, and thus we didn't have to do it if I didn't want, but that she had talked to the pain doctor down in Middlebury (the mad scientist who gave me the EMG) and trusted his opinion that the epidural would still help. I appreciated two things: her honesty, and the fact that my doctors are actually conversing. My only concern at that point was that in the rush to treat my symptoms we weren't ignoring the bigger (at least in my mind) issue of trying to actually figure out what the hell is wrong with me; I thought, and they agreed, that there was the real danger that the med and the epidural would mask each other, providing relief, but also hiding which one was actually helping, which, in turn, would give us a sense of why this whole mess ever started. My doctors just speak of "mysterious condition," which makes me feel like Marcel in Proust's Remembrance of Things Past, except that my nervous condition is physical as compared to emotional, or at least it almost certainly is.  It's frustrating, naturally, and has left me pretty down, not aided by being recently kicked to the curb (again). I guess if we knew what is causing these problems I'd feel better about the whole thing, even if the answer is not a particularly good one. Maybe I'm just egotistical enough to believe that if I just know what the problem is I can figure out a way to overcome it, but if it's a mystery then I'm stuck in a more reactive stage. Oh well, at least we're trying.

I guess every woman I've ever dated was wrong, I do have a spine.