oh lady at work, no you cannot require an employee to tell her supervisor if she got tested for COVID and the results if it was not as a result of direction from our Health Department. If she is positive or exposed and lying, then address that. (apparently woman is "not feeling well" and telling some employees she "was exposed" and telling others "she might have been exposed").

The source of my pain is a bulging disc in my neck, and if the weakness in my right arm doesn’t improve in a month, I’ll probably have to have surgery.

This is what I've been dealing with for a few months now. The pain was debilitating at the beginning, and thankfully now is under control. They gave me gabapentin to begin with which has been effective, and this past week I had a cortical steroid injection into the spinal space where the nerve root is being pinched by a herniated disc. I've got the same thing with some weakness in my right arm. Let's hope we can both beat this without back surgery.

ND, I am also on gabapentin. Before that the pain was unbearable. Hoping for no surgery for either of us.

The doctor said if it was anyone else he might suggest they live with limited range of motion, but because I use my arms for everything, it would really impact my quality of life.

The timing of this whole thing is such a pain in the ass. TCG has a new boss and has missed a bunch of work driving us everywhere, and if I have surgery he’ll end up helping us more. We have no one to help with driving or childcare because of the pandemic.

I had something similar to the bulging disc in the neck a few years ago (2011?). I had to have neck surgery, which wasn't too bad -- overnight in the hospital to make sure I didn't react badly to the anesthesia, minimal post-surgery pain. The doctor told me to stay home for 2 weeks, but I probably could have gone back after 1 week or maybe even less. The worst part was the physical therapy, and even that wasn't too bad.

Not nearly as big a deal as the back surgery of 2018. Although, to be fair, part of the problem with the back surgery is that it didn't really fix the problem. So I had to recover from back surgery while still dealing with the underlying problem.

I have so much work to do, and no desire to do it, but also a lot of it is waiting on responses from other people, which is annoying, because a lot of those people also don’t want to do their work or are already on vacation

I’m already doing PT and I’m hoping that will help.

Also, it would be very nice if the woman who is supposed to be referring me to a mental health provider would call me back because I’m really freakin stressed.

ND, I am also on gabapentin. Before that the pain was unbearable. Hoping for no surgery for either of us.

Yeah, I had a week without any sleep due to the pain. I've been impressed with how much the gabapentin really does help keep the nerve pain under control. I will say, I would like to have full feeling in all of the fingertips of my right hand again some time. That would be grand.

Yeah I hear you being able to drive my hand control car, use my crutches, or cook dinner would be great.

Wow, that sounds sucky.

I’ve been trying to decide if it’s worth the COVID risk to call up my doc and try to get a steroid shot in my shoulder—my L shoulder was painful and then froze, and only stopped being painful after the injection, and while it’s much improved, the R one now hurts in the same way, and I’d rather not have it freeze too tyvm! But COVID is so high, even going into an ortho office seems risky.

Different docs have different procedures. When my son went for his physical in October, he was told to call the office from the parking lot. They then called him when they were ready to see him.