David Gillon

I think my hypermobility flare-up has calmed down slightly, but it's still randomly rotating between body parts, and I keep randomly dropping off to sleep. And going to bed at unreasonably early times like midnight. So it's clearly fatiguing me even if I can keep pain levels down to a minimum by limiting physical activity*.

* Where 'physical activity' includes unreasonably athletic activities such as sitting up** - there was a reason I used to call my blog Flat Out.

** Though thankfully the sitting up is only some of the time. Standing is today's challenging activity - I threw lunch together in three minutes (two minute microwave rice, tin of mackerel, dollop of salsa) and that was still about a minute too long.

I helped calm my c-spine down by ordering some double-sided velcro-tape off Amazon and spending a couple of hours replacing the velcro holding the padding onto a couple of my collars, so that the padding will actually be on the collar when I need to wear it, rather than lying in the back of some cupboard. Which is why I now know there are 11 separate pieces of velcro on my Miami J collar!

I was thinking back yesterday and I think that this may be the first spontaneous*** flare up in a decade, which isn't too bad, and is good evidence for adequate analgesia making a huge difference in pain management as it's about a decade ago I started using buprenorphine and I was getting flare-ups about once a year before that.

*** There was a non-spontaneous one when my normal hypermobility pain and my acute pancreatitis pain decided to party in my lumbar spine.