Pico de Orizaba

Pico de Orizaba
Taken from Huatusco, Veracruz, the closest town to Margarita's family's ranch.

Saturday, February 23, 2013

Some strange illness my way comes...

During my 43.8 year lifetime, I've contracted the Flu a handful of times...  I've proudly boasted of not remembering ever having a fever outside of a dirty I.V. needly inserted in my arm during my last hospital stint at Mount Sinai Medical Center in Manhattan, November 2001.  My sisters (especially Beth) experienced strep throat regularly.  ¿Yo? No...  I've had one cavity in my life.  I believe I've had a strange form of influenza occasionally since late adolescence.  For some reason I was sure it was influenza, although never diagnosed... An influenza that settled into the joints and muscles, didn't cause nausea or fevers, but a strange form of paralysis, semi-paralysis that lasted maximally 3 days, one time causing my being away from the lab where I worked testing sewer sludge at the age of 20.  I wanted to believe that I had been contaminated by the sludges or by the acids I used for attempting towards isolating the various chemical substances in those sludges possibly contaminating farmland or drinking water...  But, I "knew" it was the flu and not the job... I would experience this strange semi-paralysis, strange fatigue occasionally the rest of my life...

When we were selling gourmet cupcakes in Xalapa between 2003 and 2007, I believe I had damaged the nerves from my right shoulder to my right hand from repeatedly going from the hot of the oven while baking to the cold of the freezer, where we stored our finished cupcakes.  Later on I would realize that I may have damaged the nerves in my right should from carrying 120 pound sacks of sugar on my shoulder or 50 pound crates of bananas there...  I prided on being an ox or a mule, a beast of cargo...  I loved pushing my body to it's physical limits.  Today, for at least 6 years now, I can't put much weight on that shoulder, which is much weaker than it was...

I imagined that the hot to cold and over-use damage to my arm created Carpal Tunnel Syndrome, since I would experience the symptoms in my right hand after days of typing on the computer... Truthfully, until about 2 weeks ago, I didn't know there were other Tunnel syndromes in the arm and that Carpal Tunnel only relates towards the nerve canal that passes through the center of the wrist and only affects the hand and the thumb and first 2.5 fingers...  All would be basically fine, if the nerve-muscle issues I'm experiencing were relegated to the wrist and that part of the hand...  However...

The Tunnel Syndromes can be caused by pinched nerves... they can be caused by the inflamation of tendonitis, meaning that you can have the two and not just one or the other... You can have bursitis like pains in isolated regions of the shoulder.  You can have rotator cuff and pitcher's elbow or golfer's elbow like pain in your elbow...  Benign tumors can create Tunnel syndromes by putting too much pressure upon the nerves that go towards the hand or the fingers... However, one must be very careful assuming, without knowing exactly where is the tumor or the nerve that passes through that part of the arm.  I have a lipoma (I imagine it is a benign fatty tumor in the backside of my upper arm between my armpit and my elbow.  We've been aware of it for at least 8 years now.  It hasn't grow (as far as I can see) and occassionally is "tender"...  The few doctors who've been notified of this dismissed it as a ball of fat.  Then again, they don't know about Gardner's Syndrome and that it is not just a ball of fat...  Truthfully, I don't know if it is pressing upon one of the two main nerves in my arm and if that nerve passes through the carpal tunnel, which I believe not, since Carpal Tunnel Syndrome is related to the nerve that passes between the elbow and the wrist...

All sounds pretty innocuous, doesn't it?

But then things changed in November...  (and things changed in December... and things changed in January... And things have changed such that I'm "inspired" to write about this today, February 23, 2013...)

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