Anyway, I’ve decided that being my own advocate is the only way to proceed with this. The alternatives I was presented with at my initial consult just weren’t acceptable, which was how I ended up on the alternative track to start with.* So I’m collecting all relevant information and keeping copies on my own. That way if I get stuck hopping to a new doctor at some point, I don’t have to go through all of this again.

Anyway, for your amusement, I present thoracic scoliosis with a 19 degree curve:

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*How can anyone, let alone a back specialist, tell people that their options are surgery, with fabulous new metal rod (bionic woman powers not included) or 45 minutes of aerobic exercise a day? Because climbing stairs will magically fix spine alignment issues, or something.

But there is good news on the horizon.

My new doctor wrote me a prescription for the physical therapy and is interested in monitoring my progression. So much so, in fact, that after I saw him Monday he sent me off to get new xrays made. This would not be problem except that the local imaging company seems to be run by two year olds.

It’s Monday, a workday for most people not affiliated with the government or banks, and I’ve taken a couple of hours out to go to the doctor. He sends me off to the imagingin company, and I head out for a walk in. I called ahead to make sure the waiting list wasn’t insane and am at reception within 10 minutes. I only have an hour and a half until I have to go, since I have a meeting, but it’s just xrays. No big deal, right?

Oh, but that’s so wrong. First, the person checking me in can’t read the doctors writing. But since I’m standing right there and know what he’s sent me for, I can do some interpretation. She finally gets the stuff entered and I’m off to sit and wait. I didn’t bring anything to read, so I pick at the magazines and try to avoid listening to the shouting match between an old guy and his relative/caregiver. It was like trying to ignore a Jerry Springer episode. I have no idea why they were so angry, but it was clear they were never going to get over it.

Finally they call my name and I’m thinking that they’re ready. It’s just an xray; two shots and I’m done! Except that it turns out they don’t do that type of xray there. It requires special film which they don’t have. I’ll have to go down to the hospital proper to have that done. And by the way are you in a hurry? Because in order to arrange that I had to sit back down and wait for them to call the doctor then call the hospital then come get me again. Fortunately that didn’t take very long, but there was more bad news. In order to get to the xray machine I’d have to be admitted to the hospital, which is going to take more time than I have. So I decided to take my doctors order and come back another day.

The funny part of this story is that when I went back Wednesday morning to talk to the hospital people, I had to get admitted anyway. Seems that’s just how they bill you for services and it doesn’t really take that long. I was in and out in an hour. All for 2 special pieces of film. Which were long and skinny. Seriously, they could have just used the regular squares and shot the images from farther away at the first place. Silly.

Anyway, end result is that I have a 19 degree curve now. That’s up from the 10 degree one years ago. The doctor wants a recheck in 6 months to a year to determine the rate of progression. The original surgeon told me it was about a degree a year, so I wasn’t too terribly surprised.

And I still need another prescription because the insurance company is made up of butts.

It’s not that bad really, in the range of 15-20 degrees, but it causes me massive amounts of pain if I’m not careful. And back pain is nothing to sneeze at – there are days when I can’t get out of bed for hours because it has rendered every movement painful.

This condition isn’t really a surprise; scoliosis runs in my family. Have a cousin who had to wear a brace for years to correct her spine, so I consider myself lucky. Those braces all look like portable racks to me.

The evolution of my condition was really slow. I was first diagnosed with a 3 degree curve in middle school by a school nurse and subsequent doctors visit. I pretty much forgot about it until I started waking up with pain and went back to the doctor about a decade later. They sent me off for X-rays and a spinal consult.

Can I just say that modern medicine knows nothing about backs? The spinal consult confirmed that I had an 18 degree curve. The solution? Surgery fixing my spine to a metal rod, or aerobic exercize every day. I’m not sure how the exercize was supposed to strenghten my muscles in the right way to straighten my spine, but that’s what he recommended. And there was no way in hell I was going to have such a risky surgery. So I suffered.

Until, that is, I found another way. I’ve been seeing a therapist for Postural Reconstruction off and on for the last two years.* In this time, I have started standing taller, my shoulders no longer hunch, and the pain is mostly gone. All this without the risk of surgery.

Postural Reconstruction is really simple, and yet horribly complicated. The idea is that you use muscles to work against one another so that they fix whatever is going wrong. They end up over-extending and then relax back into the position they’re supposed to be in, rather than the one they’ve come to call home over the years. I have never sweat so much from sitting as I have in one of these sessions. I think my therapist believes that twisting me into new pretzel positions is good for me somehow.

Last week, I added the Feldenkrais method to my therapy suite. This is supposed to teach me new ways to approach the world and new methods of movement to keep those old home positions from returning. We’ll see how that goes. After my first session, I felt amazingly loose and tall for 3 days. Reverting to the old habits was inevitible, it was only one session, and yet painful. It’s sad to feel the old habits coming back and know that the pain will return with them.

I’m planning to post on milestones along the way. We’ll see what they are when I get there, I guess.

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*It’s been off mostly due to stupid insurance rules about only allowing western medicine. Paying for things that should be covered by insurance makes me crazy.

Over the holidays, I had several days off from work. I figured that this would be the perfect time to do some upgrading on my web server, especially since I hadn’t really worked on it since I’d installed Fedora Core 2. Yeah, it’s really been that long. They’re up to FC8 now, so I had some serious upgrading to do. And you can’t really skip versions with the way it’s set up. Far more likely to cause problems that way. So I made what backups I could and set to it.

First stumbling block – yum. The new software update method was being a giant pain in my rear. The few sites I could get to that actually had FC3 were slow, balky and didn’t want to download in a reasonable time. Of course, this was all after figureing out what yum was and how to configure it. Google is seriously my friend, as are people who bother to post the resolution to problems they’re having. I finally figured out how to get stuff downloaded and force yum to use the local hard drive as the location of record for pulling files, and the actual upgrade went quickly.

Next, migrating to FC4. This was basically a mirror of FC3, but with less stumbling around. The process went quickly and the server rebooted back into FC4 with no hesitation at all. I should have stopped here. But no, I wanted to get current. My hardware met the minimum requirements, it should have worked fine. Should is, and always will be, the operative word in sentances like that.

I installed FC5, it went like cake, and then I rebooted. The server wouldn’t boot. It wouldn’t boot from CD either. And of course, booting from a floppy is now impossible. I was dead in the water.

My husband and I spent 7 days mucking around with the error message and trying to get the computer to boot. I burned about a zillion boot CDs that wouldn’t boot, hoping it was a method or media problem (which was part of the problem with the number of CDs I burned, but not with the computer). I burned CDs until I ran out. At that point, I threw up my hands and we went to just buy a dang book with the CDs in it. Oh, and a new hard drive as Plan B. Having a Plan B is always good.

Getting home with the book, we were able to boot into rescue mode. But still no information. And I couldn’t install FC8 worth a damn – the partitions were configured so it couldn’t go. At that point, I copied off all the data I could find and reformatted the hard drive. I wasn’t able to install on the new hard drive and jsut copy over the data because they don’t make drives small enough to work with this ancient computer. I honestly never thought I would have a problem with having <i>too much</i> space. Thank goodness I found this out before I opened the drive.

So yeah, finally got the disk to install properly and restored the data. And it turns out that the box can hardly run the OS. It’s just too much stuff, and too cool, to work with such an old PC.

All this is to say thank you for those who provided hosting data. I’ve moved the site to a host and basically decommed the server I was using. The ability to get backups on demand, never worry about power outages and have someone else worry about patching? Priceless. Well, or it’s worth more than 2 solid weeks of my time.