Actually, I’ve just come back from another two weeks away, and the weirdest things seem to happen when I’m away…
Firstly, at the start of last month we heard that some school friends of my children had lost their father - he had been having some problems with drugs and his wife had sent him off to rehab to get sorted out. He had been clean for a month, but then overdosed at the start of September (quite possibly accidentally - he had valuables and money in the apartment and had just got paid, so he wasn’t at rock bottom) and was found about a week later. We’ve been spending quite a bit of time with the family over the last few weeks, but at the end of the month the mother asked me to help her collect some keepsakes from the apartment he’d been staying in. So on the first week away from BB I found myself collecting family photos and other things from this one room apartment with basically everything but the body still there - drug paraphernalia by the sink (I guess the drugs themselves had been removed by the police), dead guy juice all over the sofa and the widow right there next to me. Quite a memorable experience.
This week, my wife had been having more trouble with her shoulder (which I mentioned in a previous thread). By this point, she’d seen 10 doctors, physiotherapists and chiropractors, who had all tried to help without much success. She’d had four x-rays, one MRI and a sonogram. Last month’s intensive physiotherapy stopped after one day because the physio gave her tendinitis, so she was given a steroid injection and told to wait for two weeks before trying again. In the meantime she had another MRI, and was told that her biceps tendon had moved out of its position. It was too late to operate with much hope of success, and they basically told her that they were trying to deal with the pain but couldn’t do much about the root of the problem. She might need more steroid injections, which would get more risky after the second one. As you can imagine, this was pretty depressing, especially as it might mean that she would have to leave the nursing career that she loves. In any case, at least we had a diagnosis that made some sense, so she spent some time online and found some possible chiropractic treatments. One of them seemed straightforward enough, so I tried it and… it worked. Literally in the space of 15 minutes, she went from serious pain to just stiffness and general tenderness in that area. Last night she had her first proper sleep in seven months and she had full mobility and a lot more strength in her arm pretty much immediately. This morning her physiotherapist couldn’t understand it and greatly revised her plan. We had been planning a trip to Marseille in two weeks and had decided to cancel, but now it looks like we can still go. Our Christian friends are feeling vindicated for their prayers and I have some serious brownie points right now. Obviously it’s still quite early and things could change again, but it doesn’t look like a high risk operation is necessary at all and it should be possible to make it less likely for the tendon to slip out of place again. So I guess you can find weird tricks online that actually work.
