My Updated Day-to-day: Rise of The Body Aches

In an earlier post, I talked about how I feel day-to-day. What I said basically is that most days, my head hurts, my chest hurts, and I am tired and confused. But, I can manage most days. On top of that, I have a variety of other strange pains that come and go including a variety of body aches.

That has changed slightly lately. My head still hurts. But, lately, the pain has been less often and less intense. A lot of days, I wake up with a headache that fades fairly fast.

I still have a sharp pain in my chest. I still have that pain basically every day. I also feel the pain radiating in my back and around my ribs.

Neither the pulmonologist, the cardiologist, nor the Atlanta post-covid clinic had an explanation for my pain or a plan to treat it. So, my quest for answers carries on.

I also talked about my fatigue in previous posts. That’s still a day-to-day battle and the struggle with my fatigue has been particularly hard recently.

I don’t currently have a steady daily schedule. I am continuing to experiment with pacing and finding the daily limits of my energy.

Currently, it’s leading me to have good days and good moments where I am very productive followed by crashes where I am incredibly fatigued.

I also talked recently about my brain fog. I am seeing improvements there. But, I am also still having difficulties.

On top of those things, however, I’m unfortunately having more problems with body aches. So, I thought I would talk more about my body aches today.

I actually have basically 4 varieties of body aches. I have the familiar pain that I now can associate with blood clots. I also have a pain that feels like muscle aches in my thighs and arms.

Occasionally, I have pains that feel like they are in my bones or joints like the pain I feel in my clavicle, fingers, and wrists.

I also have shooting, stinging pains that feel like nerves. I feel those pains in my feet, hands, but also in other parts of my body.

I have also started feeling numbness in my legs and feet on occasion.

I feel all of these pains basically all over my body but especially in my legs. It is one of the things that makes it harder for me to fall asleep at night.

It’s looking like I won’t have answers for any of these pains for a while.

But luckily, it’s fairly manageable with pain reliever. There is also hope that changing my diet will help.

I was supposed to have started a new anti-inflammatory diet. But, it’s a bit difficult to stay on diet when you’re having trouble with appetite and cooking. But, I am working on that and inching my way back to better eating habits.

I recently met with my neurologist and she has suggested some new things to try for my fatigue. She also has me trying to study the shooting, stinging pains that I feel to see if it is compressive nerve pain. Compressive nerve pain is basically like the pain that you have with carpal tunnel or when your foot falls asleep.

I’ll talk more about my meeting with the neurologist in a future post and will hopefully have updates about all of this soon.

In the meantime, I continue to try to carry on, battling doubt, fear, sadness, and setbacks.

Previously, I had given up on decorating for Christmas. Christmas is my favorite time of year. But, the prospect of putting up decorations felt beyond my capacity to do.

I recently changed my mind. So, I have spent the last couple of days slowly putting up Christmas decorations and I will do some more of that today.

#covid #longhauler #neurology #doctor #pacing #bloodclot #longcovid #bodyaches