owie butt

So did I explain all about the muscle in my butt that hurts? No, I see I didn’t.

I went in on Friday and I said, “My back doesn’t hurt or even ache, really, but there’s a muscle here at the bottom of my butt that’s really painful.” And Dr. Woody (that’s his name, don’t look at me like that) said, “Oh yeah? And it does down all the way to the back of your knee?” And I said, “Nah, it’s just right there at the bottom of my butt,” and he said, “Well, that’s good! It could go all the way down to the bottom of your foot! But we don’t want that to happen.”

I agreed emphatically.

So he poked my back on the left side and said, “That hurt?” and I said, “Nope.” And he poked my back in the same place on the right side, and I said, “GNNAAHAHGH!” Dr. Woody says, “That’s referral pain!” in entirely too cheerful a voice.

Referral pain is where a nerve is pinched in one place, but the pain or discomfort is translated down the nerve and manifests itself in another place. My pinched shoulder that I had for years and years manifested a lot of referral pain: my *shoulder* wouldn’t hurt, but my elbow and pinky finger would, because it was the ulnar nerve that was pinched, and that runs from behind the shoulderblade down through the pinky.

The same thing is happening to this muscle in my butt. Except it’s not the muscle, it’s the nerve. It *feels* like a . . . strained muscle. Like the muscle is too tight and can’t be pulled loose; you know how muscles sometimes feel like they need to pop a little to loosen up and get back into shape? That’s what this feels like.

But it’s *caused* by the fact that the nerve in my 5th lumbar is pinched. This nerve, Dr. Woody said, “is about the thickness of your pinky finger.”

This made me stare at my pinky and kind of go ‘gaaaah’.

Dr. Woody pushed my back around some, and after several crunches, said, “Ah, there we go,” although *I* didn’t feel anything different. However, the nerve pain has subsided. It hasn’t gone away, but it’s not cramping up like it was, so that’s good. If I stretch or breathe deeply or bend from a sitting position, I can still feel it and it feels sort of squidgy and wrong and uncomfortable, but hopefully after a couple more pops that’ll go away.

My spine drifts 19mm to the right, from about the bottom of the breastbone down. That’s about 3/4ths of an inch drift in about 16 inches of spine.

No wonder I’m fucked up.

In other news, the other day Mom said, “You need to get a place with a lawn,” because we have the puppy, and I said, “We can’t afford to buy a place and nobody would rent to us, not with two cats and a dog,” and Mom said, “I’d rent to you!” I said, “Well, yeah, but you don’t have anywhere to rent.”

So yesterday Mom called up and said she and Dad went and looked at a duplex that’s for sale (the whole of it) and said that they were thinking about maybe seeing about buying it and renting half of it to us. O.O

We drove by it and it’s in a great location and it looks like a nice little duplex. It’s smaller than the place we’re in (and there’s not enough room in THIS place for all our stuff), but y’know, hey, that could maybe be kinda cool. Fortunately, I like my parents. :) It’d make Sunday morning waffles easier! *giggle*