Don't mess with your compression

I dodged a bullet yesterday even though I took a bit of shrapnel.

I bent over to the ground to place a little bit of dirt into a six inch hole where my husband had placed a bush he'd dug up for me. A transplanting project I have gradiose ideas about. To move 28 little bushes, each one stem about a foot tall at the most to an area closer to the house where I can take better care of them.

My poor husband! I have so many ideas yet I can't do any of them anymore. He tries to help.

That little bit of bending over (about two times) were enough that I could feel I shouldn't be doing it. I stopped. Didn't feel too badly yesterday but after 5 hours of sleep tonight, I've awakened with burning feet that won't allow me to go back to sleep. They burn like they are freezing, though they are not cold, if that makes sense. And my legs have the "restless legs" thing going on.

I mentioned in the previous post that I sat in cervical traction for 15 minutes yesterday. I really should know better. The traction works (for me) for one thing only: when I'm feeling really strong symptoms, I can sit in it and what goes away while the weight of my head is off of my spine are things that will resolve with the fusion, and are related to the instability.

But what goes up must come down, and when the traction UP goes off, the weight, all 25 pounds of it, goes back DOWN, pressing important nerves. Dr. B calls it "rebound."

And I know dearly what the weight of the head feels like. While in the BIG invasive traction deal in NY last November, I hung by pins in my skull with 45 lbs of traction pulling it up, and when they took it all off and I was left sitting normally, no traction, it felt like someone had a 50 lb feedsack on top of my head. IN fact, I asked the technician, what did you do, put all that weight ONTO my head? He laughed and said, "No, you have no weight, no traction now."

So, I am waiting for meds to kick in so I can go back to bed. I am so thankful that, as I go through this, I have such a great partner in life, and also, that I do not have small children. I know women online (they have instability not due to broken necks but due to a connective tissue disorder) who have little children and they deal with all of this. I can't imagine how. God bless them.