Pain in the Butt

I have one.

You know how some famous people only have one name? Like Cher or Madonna? My pain has one name too: Sciatica, and she's doing me wrong.

The pain started over a week ago, on the Friday that's my first date of the month with my chiropractor, Dr. Magic Hands. (I allow myself two visits a month whether I need them or not, which I always do, but they're usually for my stiff neck - kind of an Old Testament thing.)

I told Dr. Hands (not his real name) where it hurt, a couple inches below my waist on the right side, and he said that was my sacroiliac joint. Having taken Medical Terminology and Anatomy & Physiology, I actually knew what he was saying and how to spell it. He adjusted me, and I felt much better.

But I didn't stay fixed. The pain was back by morning and, over the course of the next week, it moved downward where it lodged in my gluteus muscle and the back of my thigh and knee, with the occasional shooting pain along the sole of my foot (the WORST!).

This past Friday (no date with Dr. H.) I googled sciatica treatment and found a link to WebMD, where they said to go see a doctor if it hadn't gone away in a week. So I called Kaiser, and they sent me to their urgent clinic to see one of the doctors who used to work at one of my work's clinics, so that was pretty cool seeing someone I knew.

She gave me a prescription for Vicodin and a muscle relaxer. I'm only supposed to take the muscle relaxer at bedtime, and I think that's a good idea. I remember a guy I used to work with a really long time ago, after he hurt his back doing judo, he came to work after taking muscle relaxers. He called them his "happy pills" and decided he'd better go back home after a couple hours of doing nothing at work besides floating around a couple feet off the ground (or so it seemed to him).

The Vicodin, though, is another story. Everybody keeps warning me about this medication's addictive nature, but I'm not sure I get it. They take quite a while to start cutting down on the pain, maybe an hour or more when I really want it NOW. Over the weekend, I spent most of Saturday and Sunday sleeping on the couch. On Sunday, since the sciatica hurts the most when I'm sitting, I decided to skip Sunday School and just go for the 10:00 service. I got up at my regular time, did the normal morning routine of shower and breakfast, took my meds, curled up on the loveseat for a little nap, and when I woke up momentarily, church had already started. Darn! Missed it. The next time I woke up, it was 3:30pm, and the day was mostly gone.

Other people get La-La Land on Vicodin. I get knock-out drops. Where's the fun in that? Just as well, I suppose, because I won't be tempted to abuse them.

I'm hoping this pain in the butt disappears just as quickly as it arrived. Permanence would be an extremely bad thing.