uh-oh

Today was a physically painful day. I'm still trying to figure out why the muscles in my right shoulder have seized up the way they have. It feels exactly the way it would if I had spent too long on the phone, using my shoulder to hold the receiver. Or if I had done some other repetitive activity with it. It's hard as a rock, and there's the constant threat of a headache, creeping up the back of my head to stab me right behind the eye.

Ibuprofen, massage, and heat have all been applied with some efficacy, but I'm still wondering what's making this happen. I'm trying to pay attention to posture and unconscious muscle tightening as much as I can, and I'm doing my PT stretches when I think of it. So far there hasn't been a cure but I have seen improvement.

Everything else hurts today, too. I know I was on my feet and very active over the weekend, but I didn't do anything all the strenuous. Trust me, organizing a heap of stuffed animals is not muscle-torturing work. Except I guess it is, for me.

My throat was very lumpy today. At one point I had the feeling that something was just stuck in there (when I wasn't eating or drinking) and I just had to wait for the knot to go away. I have no idea what the heck that was, but it was unpleasant. At this moment, there are more compressive feelings in my throat than I had before my surgery. It feels like a lump convention in there.

The paranoid part of me thinks that maybe some cancerous lump has grown in a place where it's interfering with the nerves going to the shoulder and neck muscles so that's why they're so screwed up.

Of course it could just be that I'm tensing my shoulders because everything else hurts so much, but I'm just not noticing it.

Funny thing is, it was a nice day today. A little cloudy but no major humidity or rain...

Digestion is screwed up, too, and I'm wondering: am I going hyper on this new dosage? Being hyper does this to me -- headaches, bodyaches, whacked digestion -- the final straw will be insomnia, which I did have a few nights ago.

This is a delicate thing. I have to keep the TSH suppressed to keep the cancer suppressed, but with the TSH so low, I could be miserable. I have to try and keep a positive outlook that it will be possible to find a dosage to keep me suppressed and functioning.

I remember the summer with such fondness now. I remember that I felt good. I wonder if I will ever feel that way again. Right now I just feel determined to get through this, not knowing what I will find on the other side.

I only inadvertently tried to scratch the stitches on my leg twice yesterday, not at all today -- I do forget those biopsies are there. Isn't that weird? I could have melanoma but I'm 99.99% sure I don't, just the same way I was sure I had cancer before my surgery in October.

Of course I could be wrong, because I was also sure there would be distant metastases on my whole body scan, and there weren't. Heh. This time I'd like to be right.