fred

I really need to start using a camera to make this more visual.

Eh... don't have time.

So you're just left with text.

I might have reinvent my profile again. It's been 3 so far.
My main reason for staying on the site is just because I've already been here so long.

I might have to travel to China to take care of a medical problem I've recently found out I have.
It sounds pretty wacky, but it's actually true.
Otherwise what the doctors say would be most likely outcome after an unknown number of years is a hip replacement.
I'm still kind of in a wierd state of disbelief about it. It's completely asymptomatic right now though. I only found out from an MRI because of my back.
It hit me like a ton of bricks when the doctor said there was something "interesting" from the MRI.
You know what it felt like? Like when the mechanic says something like, "oh you're going to need new head gasket" or whatever and you're probably thinking, "yeah right".
So there is something there going on in the hip bone, but I'm not going to let any doctor chop on me.

Then there's the back which made me get the MRI in the first place. It's been bothering me know for about six months. First I basically ignored it for the first month or so. Then I thought it was just some sort of muscular thing.
Actually it's a disc. What the chiropractor said was a "bulging disc". That sounded not too bad at first.
These discs in between your verterbrae are like little shock absorbers. It's tough cartilage on the outside and a fluid on the inside. What I found out was my disc is kind of flattened and squishing out causing it press against the nerves by my spinal cord, hence: pain.
So bulging disc I was thinking would be like a tire with a bulge in it, something that could go back.
What bothers me most about that is that I think it's kind of a permanent thing. If your disc goes "flat" and loses its fluid I don't know if it can ever fill up again. The doc says with the right kind of exercise it can gradually to recede back and not need surgery or bee too painful. This can be several months or over a year even.
Hmm... bummer.

I don't tell many people because it's bad enough having it in the back of my mind all the time and then bring other people into it. I'll get over it though, well not entirely. That's what it's about getting older. Things wear out and fall apart.
I'm finding that out first hand.
I've hit the wall. I went for quite a long time looking and feeling young. Now it's like it finally caught up.

What is good news though is that they caught that hip problem early so I still have a chance to deal with it. That is something of the hidden blessing.
That's potentially more serious, but for now there is pain at all from it, which I'm very grateful about.

I've spent the last two weeks gradually dealing with this, the possibilities and what I'll have to do.
It's something of a challenge for me. This could be like an adventure to go to a Chinese hospital for a month. That's the best way to look at it. It'll give me a chance to have a story how I overcame this.
It puts things back into perspective about what's important and what the real story really is.

We all really need to get a little closer to death to make the living stand out more.
The toughest time I ever had when I felt like throwing in the towel came right before the biggest postive jump I've ever had in my life.
The first few days I was kind of messed up over this thinking about the possibility of long term pain or disability. To have to live like that a relatively young age made me kind of feel like, dang what would be the point in that?
That's really the worst case scenario though. The other possibility is full recovery and that's what I want to keep my mind on.