stick out your tongue and say aaaaargh

I went to the doctor today. Since last week, it feels like my right arm has been slowly going numb. It started with a pinching tingling feeling over my index and middle fingers and became slowly more noticeable up my arm towards my elbow. I can then feel it coming up the underside of my upper arm and ultimately coming from my shoulder. Gaah.

My mother had something like this when I was growing up. General stress and tension building up in her shoulders on either side of her neck, but often worse on one side. Sometimes, it would get so bad that she couldn't lift her arm higher than chest height. She would end up calling her doctor for a walk-in appointment and getting a shot straight into the muscle. Nothing else would relax it.

So I still have range-of-motion, but I can feel this nerve pain in my shoulder like a bad toothache, drowning out everything else. And this annoying, irritating nerve itch down my arm, like its going to sleep or something.

 I always hate these things, because it's not just going to the doctor and getting it fixed, it's going to a GP, then being referred to a specialist, then making another appointment with the specialist to run some tests, then waiting for the results of said tests, then finally getting some hokey, off-the-wall un-diagnosis. ("Well, we're not really sure what's wrong with your stomach, so we're going to say you have some kind of syndrome. Because then we don't have to really diagnose it.") Joy.

And maybe I just have bad luck with doctors. I went to one last spring because weeks after the flu, I still had a nasty cough and a rattling in my chest. She did the usual ear, nose, throat check, wrote me a prescription for overpriced cough syrup and told me I had some wax buildup and she would need to irrigate my ear. Well, she's the expert, so she irrigated it with cold water (which apparently you're not supposed to do) and asked me to come back in two days. We did this a couple of times that week, and the following Sunday, I woke up with an ear infection. If you've ever had an ear infection, I thank you for your groans of empathy. If you've never had one, I can only liken it to this: imagine someone shoving an icepick through your ear and into your brain. Remove. Repeat. Yup, that's exactly what it feels like.

I woke up at four a.m.  with a pounding in my head that had never existed before. I took some ibuprofen and tried to go back to sleep, but couldn't. It was so early, I didn't want to wake the spouse-unit for nothing, so I lay there trying to get over it until I started crying. I called up my sister, just bawling, who told me it was probably an infection, at worst a ruptured eardrum, and I needed to get to the ER.

Maybe I lucked out this time. The doctor wrote a rX for a chest x-ray to rule out cervical compression, where the vertebrae in your neck press down awkwardly, putting pressure on your nerves. If I'm lucky, nothing will show up and I can go see a chiropractor and go back to yoga. Yay.

In the mean time, I'm swamped with work that I just can't do. Sitting at the computer is painful for anything more than twenty minute segments. Gaaah. So frustrating.