Bigger or Better: Life outside of Texas

*"We" being mostly Me. Or rather, I LOCATION I have never been on bedrest/restricted activity before. I'm not sure whether it's better to have a bigger home to be bed-rested in (you know, for change in scenery. Right now we only have 1 bed and 1 couch, so my view options are limited...even if you count the ceiling as a scene) or to have small living quarters to ensure I don't have to walk very far to change rooms. Ruby & I cuddle more now ENTERTAINMENT So far, I have read 2 books, about 10 pounds of nursing journals (I'm not kidding. I stashed all the issues that I hadn't had time to read while in school under my bed, and now I'm catching up. I have written 33 posts on my nursing journal blog since being on medical leave), and various news articles. I've also watched lots of cat videos, several documentaries on the Vietnam war (Mark's choice), and about 2 seasons of a dark comedy Mark and I got into (he's a military history bu...

I want to tell you all [and I want to point out that I didn't  use the Southern contraction just now] exactly how my lumbar herniated disc feels. I could claim it's for documenting the qualitative aspects of illness...but I am thinking that maybe my desire to tell comes from a desire for sympathy. Or at least as a desire to absolve my guilt for sitting on my butt for several weeks. Actually, that last one is pretty real. I feel like I should be working on my beach bod or de-cluttering the apartment, or maybe watering my plants. But, no. Butt, yes. So. Whatever the whys, here's the whats. It feels like pelvic cramps of the monthly menstrual variety, except confined to the right side. Sometimes the cramping extends from my hip/butt down the posteriolateral [i.e. back outer] side of my right leg all the way down to my ankle. It feels like the femoral head is bruising my hip socket, or that the femur is a little dislocated--like something isn't quite right but can eas...

[ Lousy  in the sense that I cause difficulty, not that I have lice or anything.] This story stretches back a couple months, so brevity may  is not be one of the characteristics of this post. Once upon a time, in the first two weeks of May 2018, I did a clinical rotation at the morgue. It was pretty fascinating, but not really hands-on because I do not do autopsies [I'm not even sure nurse practitioners are allowed to do autopsies, but I definitely am not an expert in forensic nursing ] . Regardless, the point is that this rotation involved standing still while watching these pseudo-surgeries. I don't really like standing still, and this preference was accentuated because after a while, my right hip would kind-of ache. I complained of hip pain often enough that Mark told me to go see a doctor, already [he was nice about it, actually]. So mid-May, I tell my primary doctor that I've been having this achy hip, and I've noticed slight weakness in that leg, because I c...