How Do You Spend Your Holidays? (Part one: Black Friday 2014)

Ah, yes! The holidays are the glorious time of the year where your moments of happiness are often enhanced by family obligations and visits with friends you don’t get to see very often. It is also the time of year that you realise that your family, for as much as you love them, drives you crazy or that there is a reason why you don’t have frequent visits with the friends you don’t see very often.

How do you spend the holidays? I chose to start my holiday season with a visit to the doctor!

I had been experiencing some seemingly common pains that had been crisscrossing my body starting back in May. My first issue appeared to be a pulled pectoral muscle on the left side of my body. It hadn’t gone away despite backing off of it at the gym, so I made an appointment with my general practice doctor to see what he had to say about it. The examination didn’t reveal a whole lot and we chalked it up to me being an active 46-year old man who went to the gym six days a week. He gave me his advice and it wasn’t anything I didn’t already know, but it helped me justify the course of action I had already taken to remedy this matter.

The pain subsided in a couple weeks and I continued to baby the pec muscle because it felt noticeably weaker and I didn’t want to aggravate it again. Unfortunately, my right shoulder gave out on me in mid-July during one of my workouts and it hurt like a son-of-a-bitch! I was convinced I tore my rotator cuff and proceeded to treat it as if I had. I didn’t go to the doctor and just rested it. I think part of that decision came from me not wishing to acknowledge that my body was starting to fall apart. I continued to let things heal and the pain diminished, but to my chagrin I was still unable to lift heavier weights. Stupid bruised ego.

The end of the summer rolled around and I woke up on the Sunday of Labour Day weekend (that’s at the start of September for those of you might be fortunate enough to be reading this in a foreign country. Wow, my aspirations are exceedingly high!) with a massive pain in my right ribs that made it feel like someone was inside my chest cavity with a set of tiny little jacks and they were in the process of prying my ribs apart. Oh, such fun! I made another appointment to see my general practice doctor and off I went at week’s end.

Once again, the thorough in-office exam provided little in the way of surprises: “47-year old male… gym six times a week… blah, blah, blah, blah…” I told the doctor about my shoulder and he set up some physical therapy sessions to get that sorted and told me that I probably over-stretched at the gym, which is what led to all the “fun” in my ribs. Oh, sure. That seemed logical. It also seemed more logical when that pain disappeared about a week or so later.

I started having my physical therapy sessions at the beginning of October and those seemed to be going well until I began to feel what appeared to be a pinched nerve in the middle of my back. The pain in my back migrated to my neck on some days and from one shoulder blade to the other on other days. I spoke to a couple friends who’d had nerve issues in the neck or back they said that this sounded quite like the problems they’d been having and so I went back to the doctor.

The doctor agreed that a pinched nerve could in fact be the culprit and added that to my physical therapy treatments. Off I went to PT armed with an additional course of exercises to alleviate the pain from the apparent pinched nerve. I had a total of eight weeks of therapy and of those eight weeks, I probably only spent around one hour on my shoulder. This didn’t seem right as the shoulder was the initial reason I was going to PT. I decided that I probably should head back to the doctor.

I made this next appointment the week before Thanksgiving and the appointment was set for Black Friday (again for you foreigners, the first big shopping day about a month before Christmas). I wondered if I would get a discounted Black Friday deal on the appointment, but guessed I was pushing my luck. My regular general practice doctor was unavailable, so I was assigned to one of his peers. While he didn’t know me, it was probably good to have a new set of eyes on the problem. We talked for a while and he ended his examination with the dissatisfaction of knowing that my issues had been going on for the past five or so months. He sent me down the hall to get some blood drawn and told me to see the fine folks in radiology at the local hospital and have x-rays taken. Not being one to engage in any Black Friday activities, I decided I might as well just get it out of the way and take care of this immediately. 

I got the results of the x-rays few days later via a rather grievous-sounding phone conversation from the doctor who ordered them. He told me that “it didn’t look good”, but that I should have a full-body bone scan next to see what we were dealing with. It “didn’t look good”? What the hell does that mean? He wouldn’t say. Full-body bone scan? Okay, why not?

[TO BE CONTINUED...]