Nerve pain, the kind you cannot escape even with aggressive pain relief management, has recently decided to crescendo in my life. Generally I'm not the type to complain about pain or seek medical help unless it's sever, but last week I found myself in the emergency room with a deeply persistent pain and high degree of numbness / weakness in my dominant hand and arm, radiating all the way down to numb thumb and index finger.
The doctors here were all but useless in diagnosis and even after sending me for x-rays didn't even bother to explain or speculate on what the root of my pain is.. A firm "nothing is broken and therefore you are fine" aura certainly was present, and only a passing mention of physiotherapy was given as a means of treating.. Which lead me down a rabbit hole ultimately leading to the following book:
( ignore the homo-erotic styling of the cover, I swear the book is full of actual good info and not gay literotica )
Through the reading of this book (Pirate the PDF if you need to honestly, author is dead a while now) I managed to narrow down the root cause of my condition and begin to start at home physio therapy. A crash course in the mechanics of the neck and the skeletal / muscle / nerve relation it all has was necessary before I was able to narrow it down exactly.
Unfortunately given the time frame of which I was having symptoms of neck pain leading up to the state of constant grinding, numbness and weakening of the appendage attached to the damaged nerve it's quite possible I'll have to actually have bone spurring removed and artificial disc implants put in place surgically in order to alleviate the constant wearing of my C6 nerve root. All and all I'm at about 25% strength of muscle in the effected dominant arm, it's absolutely crippling to sit upright for any length of time currently and even with aggressive pain management attempts simply put the mechanical damage inflicted internally on the nerves may not only be permanent, but if left untreated could result up to and including complete paralysis of connected parts. Scary as hell.
At 16 I had a car, an old geo storm, and got T-boned by a now deceased friend in his Dodge 3/4 ton truck at 90 km/h.. Obviously had whiplash but was young and didn't think much of the injury... Fast forward a little under 2 decades later and that car crash compounded with bad posture, excessive sitting due to my IT work and years of hard living seem to finally be coming to bare the fruit sown.
Home Treatment of Serious Degenerative Bone Disease
Traction / stretching and being cognoscente of my posture as well as not only taking steps to prevent further damage, but also finding means of making it so the pain itself doesn't have an incredibly negative effect on my life has challenge. By time I'm able to get enough pain relief to relax the tension in the neck I'm so mentally dulled from the medicine it makes it difficult to work in any intellectual capacity. Currently trying to 3D print and correctly form a neck brace to be worn at all times in order to take the downwards weight compressing and bulging my herniated disk crushing my nerve, first prototype was good but the dimensions were off slightly so made adjustments and am re-printing now. If anyone is interested in the 3D model to print themselves a brace, let me know in the comments and I'll host the files on one of my servers.
Have Experience in Crippling Nerve Pain in the Neck?
Do you have nerve damage based neck pain? And if so how do you cope with and or self treat at home in order to have any sort of quality of life? I wouldn't wish this type of disease and degeneration of vital biomechanical framing on anyone, but would certainly be open to hearing how exactly one copes with this sort of thing short of being hopped up on opiates or having to have the cervical joint of the next surgically removed / replaced / fused. The pain is a stark reminder I'm awake and alive..
But my truly mentally grating and biggest fear in regards to this is that I won't be able to physically lift things or ride motorcycle at all anymore and that I end up paralyzed or with synthetic or cadaver vertebrae fused into my neck.. The old man is like that, same sort of injury that resulted in him having to retire and go under the knife to have 2 cadaver bones fused into his neck.. I call it the family curse, but there has to be some options out there to help avoid being prematurely worn out and forced into a sedentary lifestyle on heavy duty pain killers just to function.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome... But With Added OUCH
All I know is that the long hours of poor posture in front of my workstation hasn't been conducive to healing or minimizing the damage, feeling compelled to "tough it out" as I'm so far behind on things at the moment it is almost crippling in itself to think about the amount of hours sitting in front of the PC I need to do in order to get things done.. But regardless of the pain and being overwhelmed workload wise I'm going to be making a more concentrated effort to loop back around and get some of the HIVE stuff going here and un-back-burnered.
HL, HSC, HR and some other smaller HIVE centric projects have been opened back up project code side here in the past day or so, was aiming for a end of Q1 resurrections / launch of these things, god willing this is still possible, although I may have to strip out some features and focus on the primary service functions, leaving the frills and extraneous functions on the office floor until I have time and health to dedicate into proper implementation.
HIVE Development Work, You're Golden or Nothing Here
Some folks have been razzing me about the wait on the projects, rightly so, but it's also important to realize that expecting 1 injured and over-worked developer just trying to do what he can to keep things rolling is about all I can do right now, If you want to downvote me due to being impatient or feeling entitled to do so after showing some backing to the development of the projects, go for it, but it sure as shit doesn't make me want to sit through what is effectively crippling pain to try and please people who are going out of their way to stress me out and financially detract some percentage of my potential income.
I'm a bit let down at the rate of development myself and given the grandfathered in "ruling class" of accounts here on HIVE care not to support me in any realistic sort of means it's forced me to take my software engineering skills into other networks. Mostly EVM based stuff as it's the standard now and we aren't there yet.. We by all rights should be, given a few groups, some prominent, some backwater are working on this shit... But alas we are not, although personally working to change this.
It is what it is, I'm not being negligent of the HIVE stuff out of spite or lack of fucks given, it's just that I literally could not afford to continue to spend days coding on HIVE projects that I know will yield great results for the community, but the run up development time on was making financially infeasible to continue on as 100% focus. As it sits HIVE based projects are getting ~30% of my development hours, which is up from the 5% or so that it was privy to months prior. Obligated to deliver the best services and software that I can manifest for the community, both financially and morally..
Plus out of fear that if I don't innovate than those propped into power here will fail to do so, due to not having the financial stresses to drive them to innovate or work long hours.. The lack of my own development work here is underlined boldly, but there is a trend here on HIVE as a whole it seems for developers to either be underappreciated / underpaid, or way the fuck over valued and less than deserving of their position as it was acquired under the guise of development work, which frankly given some of the budgets / income these top rankers possess, should have been feasibly completed in a time scale of a few months, given the proclamations of having teams working on things and the like. :/
Not going to name names or fling shit here trying to cause a scene, ya'll know who you are and what you're doing.. I just wish this system hadn't been set up in such a way to encourage this sort of behaviour, as frankly it's not only unsustainable but also results in extremely little motivation to do anything once you're "to big to fail" stake wise here.. Not sure if oversight on Dan Larimer's part or by design to be honest.. Still think Dan had decent intentions here, but was naïve to think his system wouldn't encourage formation of cartels and some strange oligarchy or some shit.
Comfort Complacency and the Sin of Sloth
There is some truth to the old adage that people without looming stress of starvation or homelessness are far less effective at innovating or working long hours... and given the top rankers here are effectively in a colluded stance with stake large enough to ensure they cannot feasibly be ousted by the community.. well, you get it.. There isn't a lot of motivation to rise to the top when you're already locked in with your buddies and have no pressure to do anything. :/
This past 6 months or more hasn't been great HIVE project development wise, nor as far as health or well being. Things will improve, development will ramp up moreso the more able I am to sit and the more I'm able to financially pad myself from what is effectively chronically underpaid and under appreciated development hell here on HIVE. I only ask for your patience and understanding into this matter and refuse to beg for development subsidies.. A lot of the Web3 / smart contract shit I've been working on with the other networks will be ported over to HSC/HIVE here as well, drastically increasing the chances of when the EVM capable sidechain is ready, that it will have no shortage of applications and services accompanying.
Thanks for reading, please let me know if you've had similar injuries and if so, how you managed to overcome and or self treat the symptoms and root cause.. never been one to woe is me bitch and complain about injuries much, but then again I've also never experienced nerve damage to the point of losing feeling in my hands either.. Given sitting upright in a chair and typing, be it code or shitposts, is how I make a living, this type of injury is less than optimal in so many ways. :/
Are You a Skilled Developer with Cryptography Knowledge?
If there are any GOlang coders reading this and you want to help expedite he HSC development, please let me know. Originally was going to do up the sidechain in Javascript, but frankly it's not a great language for anything handling large volumes of numbers or data streams in this case..
Even a bit of help on the key type conversions and adapting the ENS system to mimic the HIVE account address functionality would drastically help not only my own development push but our community here as a whole. Pay will be lackluster and I can't afford to pay you what you're actually worth outright at the moment in the pursuit of transparency, but if you're willing to work with me and exhibit any sort of aptitude for this sort of engineering it's almost certain that not only do you become legend on this network, but that you'll also be directly in part responsible for shaping the future of this community. <3 Likely would be a contractual / part time / a few days a week at most type thing with compensation paid on either an hourly or by milestone completion type gig.
And with that I'm off to decompress my neck a bit, have some lunch consisting of a bit of toast and juice and going to take some dexamethasone and pray for some relief as I wait for v2 of my neck brace to print. Will try and make a proper update post here sometime today as well, outlining my plan to get things rolling here in the next month, health and healing permitted.
Once again thanks for reading. Cheers to all my supporters and fans, a big old dick in the eye to people bullying me over development timelines and peace and prosperity to the indifferent.
Oh man, I hope you are able to find relief. I have beat myself up over the years and have different back/neck ailments but luckily it hasn't hindered me too much up to this point (though I am aware that might not always be the case).
Short of actually hanging myself a bit to relieve the compression, even the heaviest of opiates like hydromorphone only scratch a bit of the pain away. There are certain ways of moving that literally bring tears to eyes or cause my hand to not respond or neck to lock up in muscle spasm.
There is tons of ways to surgically or mechanically give a bit of relief it seems... but I'm past the point on my right side of even being able to prop my head up with my arms..
Been doing a lot of traction / stretching to try and slowly work the vertebrae and discs back to a livable level of pain.. The chances of being paralyzed or permanently damaged though with this sort of thing is very real and trouble.
Have a slipped disk in my lower back too, but it's only bad the odd day, causes leg to be a bit numb or week.. this neck nerve pinch is far greater a strain and danger than my lower back.. takes more weight too.. I am currently using 3 chairs in my office to apply varying degrees of support to the neck / head.
Generally I'm pretty resistant to being overwhelmed by pain, but this nerve pain is topping up well over being stabbed in terms of pain felt, even as I type this and take a deep breathe all i hear is bone burrs grinding. I gotta go lay down for a bit.
Cheers!
Damn dude, I'm sorry to hear about the pain. I have sensations that sometimes feel like pain throughout my arms and chest and it's uncomfortable and annoying but I can't imagine it being worse and affecting strength too. Don't ever forget: you're a resilient fuck. I'll try not to forget, too.
<3 thanks man. As someone I've known online for years for whatever reason you pointing out of my resilient nature helped shake off some of the mental anguish that's accompanying this sanity disintegrating pain.
Sorry man. I injured my back in the 90s, and it redefined pain for me. All of my lumbar discs are herniated and one is ruptured, and then there's the pinched nerve. They wanted to do a bunch of surgeries, but they mentioned that they'd cut the nerve, and that's how they'd reduce pain.
It didn't take much imagination to realize that without that nerve, I'd have no way to measure what I was doing to my back, and that would prevent me from taking care of it, which would injure it more. I've seen a lot of guys go in for surgery on their backs, and a few weeks after getting chopped up, they're giddy with relief. About six months later I see them in a wheelchair, cursing the doctor that left the goldfish in their spleen.
I declined surgery. I started working construction. I am super careful about not moving wrong. I don't sit in chairs for long. I either stand or lie down. I have exemplary posture. Still working construction. In fact I'm reflooring a house, which is particularly agonizing on my back, so I work partial days. I can do that.
I'm self enjoyed... er, employed.
I'm not a doctor so don't consider this medical advice. I'm a carpenter. Consider it carpentry advice. I'm glad I did not get surgery, even though I hurt all the time. At least I'm not in a wheelchair, and working has kept my muscle tone up, which has enabled me to not allow my back to get worse. Well, it's worse, but not as worse as it could be.
Really do research before getting cut on. Ask for references, and actually talk to them. Ask for references from the people things went wrong on, and talk to them. Don't let them shine you on and if they won't give you references from people that didn't get better, get a better doctor.
You are very capable of understanding what's going on in your back, and just what would be done to you in a surgery, so do your due diligence. Also, quit sitting in chairs. They suck for your back. Stand or lie down. I'm lazy so I lie down.
Works for me.
No need for sorry captain. You did not do this to me, a culmination of things have caused this, but primarily my own self neglect and doing death march style coding sprints.. I have not been kind or set realistic expectations for myself, and trying to make it as a self-taught + self-employed (most of the time) software engineer put me in a position it was either starve / be homeless or literally trade my well being for an attempt at greater well being.
My old man has similar issues and went under the knife, fucked him right up and he's never regained his motion, strength or been able to get comfy as much since.. Seeing him go through this and my own symptoms mirror his path scares the shit out of me.. Walking a fine fucking line between being healed or permanently suffer some debilitating shit with surgery. Doctors scare me more than death, been dating folks in the medical industry long enough to realize the actual nature of it.. It's educated guess work at best, regardless of how talented or specialized any damn doctor is.
Oh man, the sitting, laying, walking.. hell even taking a shit is an invitation for my neck disk to get compressed or shoot shocks down my arm and stuff. I'd had nerve pain prior to it getting really bad, but now "my world is pain" for lack of a better term. Trying to man up and tough through it, but I also am acutely aware that pushing through this is jut causing more nerve damage.
Trying my best to do the excersizes that physio will run me through but sadly I simply put cannot muster enough strength at this point to even properly attempt to adjust my own neck as it needs done.. I've read up on exactly what needs done, but short of effectively hanging myself just a little to relieve the nerve compression then getting the herniated disk to try and suck back into spot.. fuck my life, aboutht eonly thing that feels even remotely ok to do is hang off the bed slumped with my head hanging down with gravity.. Getting up from this position however is straight fucked pain and alignment wise.
You got serious balls and iron will to do construction with the type of injuries you speak of, I don't even think I could swing a hammer or help lift a drywall board at the moment, so kudos to you sir for being abel to do this.
I know waht's wrong, I know whats out of place, but it is all sort of irrelevant if I cannot muster the ability to setr things back towards the proper direction.
Just got an email from the physio clinic, gonna get things lined up to get looked at asap and straight up refuse surgery if that is what they suggest. A proper MRI to assess exactly how far fucked things are and if this is going to be a life long thing or if healing potential exists is a must do, but is increasing my stress / anxiety way the fuck more than it should.
Currenntly rotating throgh 3 different chairs in the office to apply varying degrees of support.. The unfortunate part about this all is what I do to live is almost impossible to do well crippled up in bed, but then sititng in front of the terminal is also screwy.
Been ingesting heroic doses of Kratom just to mask the fact that I'm injured far beyond what I'm capable of ignoring. I feel for you and everyone else here that has back / neck / spinal damage or warping. I wouldn't wish this shit on even those I'd like to see immolate.
Nerve pain is no joke. I'd rather be shanked in the face hourly than have immediate and immense pain from the second I wake up till the moment I'm to physically exhausted to have the pain keep me awake.
Thanks for the share of story and also the emotional / mental support. If you can have similar issues and work construction I can suck it up and sit in a chair for a few hours a day. Have a gooder and I wish you less pain and no further degeneration of your health and physical state.
I have created a tool to help back pain , i am a back pain healer and i wish i could help everyone who suffer , the thing is it is not the back , back is only the tip of the iceberg , the whole body , guts included must be taking care of .
Also Something with our spinal fluid is disconnected .
Health is wealth and we know it only through pain and then when we are healthy
Our world is the reflection of human health , it sucks bad .
Breathe , Breathe and Breathe ( inhale / exhale through the nose only )
That would be the first step you must do
Sending good vibes and healing energies 🔸