Hil, Dubai is wacky scary. You have to get the freaking Secretary of State to say your asthma drugs are okay?! You get detained for weeks over poppy seeds on your bagel? Marking the UAE off the list of places I'll ever visit.

he doesn't trust the Garmin and has an innate need to be able to see the big picture about where we're going in relation to where we've been

Juliebird, I am your dad with regard to physical maps. Even with a GPS and directions printed from Google, I want a map in my hand.

§ ita § Good luck in getting a dang nurse there sometime today.

Jesus Christ on a Pogo Stick. I cannot believe how poor pain management is. Fuck.

Hope you get good news soon {¡§_ita_§!}

My dad is scary good at directions, even in his senility. Put him on a mountain top with his watch and a sunny day, and he'd be able to identify the surrounding peaks because of his brain!map and which way is north. But get him in the car on a route that me and mum have driven at least six times before with the Garmin to get to our favourite diner? No trust. Where are we? You're not gonna make us take 95, right?

But, I'm tickled that he's rediscovered having fun, especially after a year of cleaning out his mother's house and finally signing the papers on selling it (we'll see if there are sticky lawyer issues with his brother, co-owner, trying to pull a fast one over on him), and his statement that he'll never stop working, I'm gonna try to get him to start taking monthly jaunts with mum, and have the retirement he apparently won't let himself have (he's extra disgusted with his little brother, who isn't even 60 and is retired and crying about he can't do stuff (like fix up their parent's house for the realtor)).

I still remember when I was using maps, and my friend in the passenger seat took the map off her lap to grab something from the footwell, and the map got sucked out the window. I think that might have been the end for me.

But, I think it would be hilarious to inundate pops with fifty state maps. Maybe I'll even throw in a trip to Wyoming that leads to a dude ranch (directions will of course lead to long-term parking at the airport).

I hate that pain management for Hubby--big, blond, white dude with yards of scars--is so much easier than it is for ita. They believe him when he says he's in debilitating pain. They do check his blood and urine to make sure he's actually taking the drugs and not selling them, but that's it. I don't know if there's anyone at Hubby's pain center who doesn't have observable reasons for pain but who is just trying to convince people on their word alone. There's a Nobel in it for whomever can create a machine that can read a person's perceived pain. Bonus for giving that machine the means to inflict it on someone who makes the decision as to how much relief to give the patient. Put that in your Puritan pipe and smoke it, bucky.

They believe him when he says he's in debilitating pain.

ISTG, sometimes I have to sit myself down and try and convince myself that I'm not a bad person and I'm not asking for too much. But why is the interim nurse arguing with me about when the visit is normally scheduled for? She doesn't have to take it personally that even the chronically late Woo Woo can make it here by 11:30 these days.

She will be here in an hour, she says. I need to distract myself from worrying about how she'll carry out the orders. Now that we've gotten off on such a bad foot.

Maybe more pie. This week's pie was good.

There's an interesting book out called The Pain Chronicles, about pain research and patient experience, which I highly recommend.

Unfortunately for pain patients there is NO 'Pain Center' for the brain that science could just zap and turn it off, and no way to exactly and objectively quantify how much pain a person is feeling. And then, patients with exactly the same broken bone, where the doctors can identify the exact break, can have two subjectively different pain levels.

And worse: men get prescribed pain relief much more readily, and in much bigger doses relative to body size.

And worse: men get prescribed pain relief much more readily, and in much bigger doses relative to body size.

Being white doesn't hurt any either.

I can't read a short article about people's pain experience, so I don't think I could subject myself to an entire book without a breakdown. I'm interested in the facts, but can barely handle them...

Ha! The home health admin called to check up on what was going on, and she's a fucking yardie. You can be sure I identified myself as Jamaican, because as much as black women get the short end of the pain management stick, I am going to leverage the immigrant experience, the Caribbean immigrant experience, and quite specifically every shared Kingston moment I can to make myself a real person when I can.

(She had ackee and saltfish for breakfast--I am quite jealous...)

A friend of mine just had a scary because of her high tolerance for pain.

She gets an IUD. It's fine and then becomes uncomfortable. Calls the doc, they tell her discomfort is normal for six months blah blah. She feels like she can "feel" it. Calls them back. Normal. Finally she has no comfortable position to sit in, actually takes some Advil (which she never does), and feels warm anyway... so she goes to the ER.

It had shifted. It was infected. Her temperature was 103.5 The doctor who removed it didn't know how she was upright at all much less driving herself to the ER.

I was briefly INCENSED that her doctor hadn't listened to her in the first place but... this is a woman who took Tylenol after her root canal. Once. She's just not normal. She's fine and there's no permanent damage. But from now on if she feels ANYTHING from ANYTHING I'm going to be all "Go to the ER."

Yeah, § ita §, I doubt the book can tell you much that you haven't figured out from the inside. Since I deal with much lower-level chronic pain it was helpful to be able to put some conceptual parameters around my situation.

Pain threshold is one of those interesting dilemmas -- pain is one of the best warning systems we have, that when it works as it should it tells us "stop doing that" so you ignore it at your peril -- unless it's set way too low so that you're a princess with a pea under the mattresses.

(When MA finally gets around to instituting its medical marijuana law, I'm planning to see if I can try it, it sounds as though a small dose of THC might be an effective intervention for my fibromyalgia, because opiods are not a good solution. I don't need a firehose, I need something like a dry ice fire extinguisher.)

Many times, Hubby will medicate with booze, which worries me, considering how many opiates he's on, but a couple of shots of Barenjager hits the pain receptors the way all these drugs don't.

ION, I'm watching my lectures for the Global History of Architecture, and this professor is so delightfully giddy over megalithic dolmens. He's like a dog with a new bone as he shows the slides, and he's so disappointed that no one in the class seems to share his glee.