D. Lee Jackson

Words and Music

Can I Trade In My Back For A New One?

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I was hoping that by now I’d be posting about all of the accomplishments and progress I’ve made in novel writing and/or music composition. Alas, I have none to report. Bad timing and plenty of health problems have gummed up the works. After a planned short vacation, I got hit by a rather nasty upper respiratory infection and a skin rash at the same time. That took up January.

I thought I’d got my ducks in a row early in February, but on the first Monday of the month I woke up with severe pain along my right hip and leg. It progressed up to my back and down to my foot. My normal Chronic Pain Syndrome medicine wasn’t making a dent in it. I finally had to call the doctor (I almost didn’t make it to his office, thanks to the pain I had from working the gas and brake pedals of my Ridgeline). He gave me a steroid shot for the inflammation and a prescription for hydrocodone to kill the pain. The hydrocodone only worked at the maximum dose, so he gave me a refill and referred me to a spine specialist, whom I saw a couple of hours ago. He added Topamax to my hydrocodone and scheduled me for an MRI on this coming Monday (his first guess is a pinched nerve on my right side, with leftover pain on my left side from an L1 compression fracture that happened in June of 2009).

In summary, I haven’t managed to get a damned thing done, except for seeing doctors.

I’ll get the results from the MRI a week from tomorrow (Friday). I can only hope that my pain is something the doctor can fix, and not something that I’ll have to live with like I do with my ankle pain.

Questions? Comments? Please feel free to use the Contact page. Thank you for reading!

IBS-IBD Fiber Charts Update

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I had the pleasure today of conversing again with Kathy Steinemann, the author of the IBS-IBD Fiber Charts reference guide. This is the book for which I wrote a foreword and which includes my humorous short story, “How Not to Prepare for a Colonoscopy.” Kathy gave me the good news that the guide found success at Amazon, who “pegged the print book as a #1 New Release when it first came out.” Very good news indeed!

Her guide is a remarkable piece of research. If you’re not familiar with the subject, the guide is intended for anyone suffering with irritable bowel syndrome or inflammatory bowel disease, as well as for friends and family of people with these conditions. Kathy says, “There’s nothing worse than seeing someone suffer and not knowing how to help.” Her book provides that help in the form of charts of the amounts of soluble and insoluble fiber for over 450 different foods, and specifically mentions the benefits of soluble fiber in the diet of anyone suffering from IBS or IBD. She also lists internet links for sufferers and their families. As a victim of IBS myself, I am very glad that she took the time and put in the effort to provide such a valuable resource.

The book is available from a number of sources, linked on the right side of this blog. If you are a sufferer or know someone who is, please consider getting a copy. My thanks go out to Kathy for her work, as well as for the chance she gave me to provide a bit of levity for those who suffer from this “often-debilitating condition,” as her guide very accurately calls it.

Questions? Comments? Please feel free to use the Contact page. Thank you for reading!