Huh - I’d have thought the exact opposite there: you’d want to block the prostaglandins as that would give you the biggest pain relief “bang” for the buck. I’d heard that the NSAIDs are great for menstrual pain for that reason. Of course, I’m not a medical person and there may well be reasons the NSAIDs work well for cramps but aren’t great for other prostaglandin-related issues.
If your body makes MORE prostaglandins than the prostaglandin blockers can block, then they won’t be very effective, I meant. Better to try another route, sometimes. The alternative is upping and upping the dose until your body can’t beat it, but your kidneys don’t like that very much.
I don’t know if it’s dumb or not, but I’ve told the story of how I fell in the grocery store parking lot on Easter Saturday with approximately 900 people in the parking lot. I fell hard, on my hands and my face and my knees, actually stunning myself. The face injury was aesthetic damage but the hands…I went to the doctor right away to see if there was a fracture, and I was a little embarrassed to be a 33 YO telling him I fell down.
But I’m glad I did. There was no fracture, but it was reassuring - that hand did not heal fully for about three months. For about three months I could not lift a full pot of water from the stove with that hand, for example.
Weird how you heal less easily as you get older.
Ok, here’s a secret. When I was about fifteen I decided I was going to make rotis, which are basically flatbreads lightly sauteed in oil or butter or ghee. Well, mom was out at work. I cooked one side just fine, and then flipped it, toward me like a dumbass. I had put far too much ghee and the ghee splashed up and soaked my entire arm.
HOWLING pain. It was awful. I called my mom at work, crying. She didn’t believe me the first time that it was that bad and told me to put some cold water on it. I cried and cried and called her back in an hour. She still didn’t believe me. Finally the third time I called she believed me and came home.
I still remember the guilt on her face when she saw two and three inch blisters rising up on my arm. I had to go to an emergency clinic and they had to lance them.
The secret? Not wanting her to know I had tried cooking I cleaned up all of the evidence before she got home and told her it was because I burned my arm in the shower. And the thing is, they went to check the temperature on the hot water heater, and it WAS set above boiling, so it was more than conceivable that I could have burned my arm on too hot water.
I never, ever told anybody any different. You guys are the first ones to know the truth! It’s been twenty-one years.
So, years ago, I was appointed the Safety Rep for my building. Big responsibility, I had to send out emails warning people about dangers of such things as dehydration or not wearing protective equipment while working outside.
Anyhow, about two days after being appointed in this position, I was running through the front door on a rainy day, slipped on the ceramic tiles in the entry way, and broke a finger while landing (I also somehow managed to kick the wall on the way down). I was doing the “digit validation check” (wiggle your fingers and toes and see if anything has too many joints) when I was surrounded by senior NCOs trying to see what happened (I managed to do this immediately outside the section superintendents’ hallway, which is right next to the office suite where the First Sergeant, Chief, and Squadron Commander work).
One of the master sergeants spent the rest of the morning following me around insisting that I go to Medical, while I insisted that I was fine. Then my pinky finger began to swell up and turn purple…
So yeah, called Medical, got an appointment for the next day, they did an X-Ray, and it turns out I broke my pinky finger. They referred me to a specialist, who looked at the X-rays the medical clinic did, said something along the lines of “That’s cute, but we’re gonna give you a real X-ray now”, and proceeded to give me an x-ray on a much more precise (and expensive) machine.
Yep, turns out, I broke my pinky finger. He said that if there was a “good” way to break your finger, I found it. Fracture deep enough for me to learn my lesson, but not deep enough to affect the joint and cause any long-term paralysis.
Couldn’t lift weights or do pushups for 2 months while I recovered, which of course left me with a single month to prepare for my PT test. :rolleyes:
The best thing though? When my boss told me to give him some bullets to put on my annual personnel review, I included one about “As safety rep, leads by example, raising awareness of office hazards.”
Which was technically true. that same EPR had to get looked over by the SNCOs that I mentioned earlier, and signed off by the commander whose office I broke my finger running on a wet floor about 20 feet away from. There’s no way they didn’t know what that bullet actually meant, despite what it said.
I got a 5 (top score) on that EPR, including the bullet that meant “Runs on wet floors and hurt himself”
I strained my back during sex. Got it adjusted by a tiny chiropractor. Yes, they’re full of woo, but the back-cracking certainly seems to help.
See, and a friend of mine in the Army was actually proud of the fact that she injured her back having sex. But I guess that all depends on the sort of sex one prefers to be having.
Not me, and the silly part is not the beginning, which could have been deadly - it’s the middle.
There is a freeway in northern Spain, between Pamplona and San Sebastián, which at one point is marked with a speed limit of 40km/h instead of the usual 110; you can tell when someone hasn’t driven there before because they think the signs are a mistake or something until their car tries to become a UFO.
Between the time when it was paved with slabs and becoming a twisty, sloped freeway with a river to one side and a cliff to the other, it was a twisty, sloped, narrow road with a river to one side and a cliff to the other. And one day during this time, a bus ran my not-yet-Dad off, down the river’s side for a fall of about 30m. The cops who got him out of the car were almost as stunned as he was when they found out that the only injury he’d sustained was a spectacularly-broken nose.
They shipped him to the nearest hospital, where the surgeon proceeded to fix his nose - but hey, Dad had a nose along the lines of Bob Hope’s: not elegant at all! And the surgeon had just come from a course in cosmetic surgery, so he didn’t just turn Dad’s nose to its former “potato-like*” state; he turned it into an elegant Roman nose.
A few weeks later, Dad got his potato back: the new nose may have been pretty (I haven’t even seen pictures) but it wasn’t very well built. The first time he’d sneezed after the bandages came off, it had started bleeding badly inside. Don’t ask me how come the second surgeon was able to fix the first one’s work, but I can verify that Dad’s nose always looked like Bob Hope’s and that the surgeon was still having his leg pulled over that incident 30 years later.
- line from a Bob Hope movie, describing his nose.
I have ibuprofen headaches, paracetamol headaches and shampoo headaches (these go away by washing my head - not sure how much is the massage and how much the relaxation but whattheheckever, it works). Took me a while to figure out which was which but damn it’s SO nice knowing it!
So would I be correct in assuming that you spent several days walking around with a perfectly matched pair of comedy thumbs, like a white-gauze iguanadon?
An outstanding effort - we appreciate your sacrifice. And applaud your frugality in maximising the number of fixed thumbs from the one doctor visit.
When I was about 3 (because I have a very faint memory of the doctor visit) I apparently stuck Plasticine up my hoo-haa. I honestly have no idea why on earth an otherwise sane child would stick such a thing in such an orifice.
So I was sitting on my bed, in the of cleaning, and I was taking a break and eating some jellybeans when I heard my dogs barking out in the backyard. I was getting a little aggravated because I was enjoying my jelly bellys. So after a few minutes of their constant barking, my lazy ass decides NOT to get up but instead pat on the window to shut them up. See, I’ve done this before and no problems but I guess this time was just one too many. The second time I patted the window my hand goes right through it. I’m sitting there thinking, “What the HELL just happened?” HOW IS THIS POSSIBLE!! MY BF IS GONNA KILL ME! lol Then I started to bleed really bad on my wrist so I started to freak out. I called my mom and had her take me to the E.R. and we waited there for 7 hours. When I finally got to see a doctor after taking a few X-rays of my hand, they had told me I had no glass in my hand whatsoever… All I needed was a good cleaning and a Tetanus shot. After they washed away all the blood it was just a few cuts and scratches… I’m like really? I was freaking over this? So I basically went to the e.r. and waited 7 hours to get Neosporin and a Bandaid. DRAMA QUEEN?? I’m super embarrassed. The guy who also cleaned my cuts had asked what type of friends I had, the ones who would make fun of me if I had my hand wrapped around in gauze, I said yes. So he insisted to wrap my whole hand in a pound of gauze and sent me on my way… I told my bf that my cuts weren’t serious but he has yet to see and he’s gonna laugh his ass off… :smack:
From what I’ve read (in “Trick or Treatment?” by Simon Singh and Edzard Ernst), some kinds of back pain can genuinely be helped by chiropractic treatment. But anything else chiropractors claim (and they claim a lot) is bogus.
Now that’s how you get out there and meet people!
Ibanez, another locked knees experience! At work I was using a machine you kind of had to lean into. It had a shallow ledge that hit me right me right at the knees. When I finished and straightened up I couldn’t walk; one of my knees wouldn’t work. I stood there a couple minutes and finally limped back to my desk. I told my co-workers what was going on and they sprang into action: one called a doctor familiar with our insurance while another pulled a pair of crutches out of the closet. I left to see him, painfully hobbling. By the time he came into the examining room I was able to rise and walk around the room. “It’s a miracle!” he declared. I went back to work feeling like an idiot and shucked the crutches.
When my older son went through puberty one of his breasts became alarmingly swollen. The pediatrician told me it was normal. I’d certainly never heard of that kind of thing before. But when the same thing happened to my younger son I was able to tell him not to worry about it.
That same son must have had some issues. He wore velcro sneakers he pulled so tight the ends drug the ground. One day the school nurse called and said he was in pain and having trouble breathing. I told her to lift his tee shirt and take a look. She gasped and said OMG He looks like a tied up hot tamale! She unknotted his sweatpants and then he was just fine.
For the bug-in-the-ear phobes who’ve posted, the young lady on the TV show Raising Hope sleeps with a pantyhose over her head to keep just that kind of thing from happening. Works for her.
I didn’t go to the doctor for this but, more than once I have given myself a pretty deep cut to my thumb with the fingernail of my index finger. It happened while opening orange juice. The type of OJ that comes in the carton and the opening is about the size of a nickel and you lift a little plastic ring then yank out the plastic seal.
You’d think the lesson would be to trim my nails more often. Nope, I just buy the frozen concentrate OJ now.