Oh My Aching Back!

These might actually work

I'm way behind in updates and people are starting to get alarmed, so here's the update: I'm much better both mentally and physically. (Hopefully I didn't just jinx my recovery.)

Basically, I was recovering from that painful bout of sciatica (or so I thought) but progress seemed to be slow--I had this really awful limp if I walked any distance--and I thought I probably needed to push myself a bit more. Activity is actually good for sciatica. So is strengthening your core. I figured I needed a lot more of both. Which is how after a day of swimming, gardening and kung fu exercises I ended up in the emergency room.

That was a surreal experience. Happily, the memory is pretty foggy. Essentially, they were unable to help me. The injection they gave for pain had--I'm not exaggerating--zero effect. The pills they gave for pain, inflammation, spasm...were all ineffective. I could not eat, sleep or stay in one position for more than thirty seconds, and that went on for days. Three days, to be exact. I had three days of--again, not exaggerating--sheer agony before I was finally able to get in and see a GP.

Continental Plate?

The long and the short of it is three days of physical therapy a week for the next month and pain killers that actually work--but leave me mentally fuzzy (which is not optimum when you earn your living writing). I can eat, sleep, sit and even walk again. In fact, thanks to years of yoga and kung fu, I'm actually pretty flexible and still have excellent range of motion (to the astonishment of my physical therapist who says the patch of inflammation stretching from my back to my hip is as big as a continental plate).

There's nothing life-threatening here and I honestly feel silly even talking about it, except that my sudden disappearance needs some explanation.

Because sitting is really bad for sciatica, I'm using my chair time for writing--and basically abandoning all social media for now. Some lovely friends are filling in for me on my Facebook wall with great posts about writing and reading mysteries, and I know my Goodreads group always has lots to chat about whether I'm there or not. I'm not really responding to email right now.

That's where things stand at the moment. Marlowe the Evil Mastermind Puppy is doing great--he took advantage of my weakened state to start sleeping with us, but that's okay--The Monet Murders is coming along, slowly but surely, which is how I'm coming along. Slowly but surely.

1222222222222222222222222222qww (That's Marlowe signing off for both of us till the next time.)