Pain in In other news

My back is in complete spasm. I’m lying here literally rooted to the bed unable to move.

I’ve a long standing history of back problems. Thanks to spending half my lifetime caring for people, and the first half of that at a time when manual handing training, and equipment, wasn’t even a thing, I first injured my back when I was 19. I sprained the whole left side, unbelievably as I was standing up from a chair. Spending the three previous years lugging old people about had taken its toll.

It’s never been the same since. I have some degree of pain most days but for the most part can work through it and ignore it, and manage to avoid pills. It’s been giving me hell all day today, actually it’s mostly been my shoulders. It’s just as I’ve lay down in bed that it’s kicked off and gone into spasm. I pretty much just have to wait it out. It hasn’t done it for a while, but the worst time was when I was in the shower and couldn’t climb out of the bath, so just had to stand underneath the hot water until it passed!

I feel like a right negative nelly at the moment. I don’t feel like I’ve written a positive entry in a long time. Work has been mental, insanely busy and lots of extremely poorly patients. Young patients too which has taken an emotional toll on all of us. Coupled with the fact that a couple of people are off sick and then it’s the end of year rush to squeeze in annual leave, we’ve been on skeleton staff. I haven’t had more than two days off together in weeks, and my shifts around those days have run into about 80 hours per week, the way they’ve fallen.

I’m off from Friday until Thursday night next week and I can’t wait to use that time to recharge. I never thought I’d look forward to night shifts so much but I feel like more and more responsibility has been placed on a few of us in work lately with regards to chemotherapy and coordinating the ward. We have a new electronic prescribing system and even now, after a few weeks, we’re still having some massive glitches with it which makes life so much harder.

Just need to get through the next two days then a week off is all mine, and maybe I’ll have something more positive to write.