Breathing and Pain

This past week or so has been rather miserable for me.  Pain has been my primary complaint followed by overwhelming fatigue coming in a close second.

I am still off my feet most of the time due to aggravating my knee injury while cutting the lawn last Friday.  The swelling is still slowly receding but my knee is not yet anywhere near ready to jump back into getting anything accomplished while on my feet.  I limp to the bathroom then limp back to the couch.  

I'm doing a lot of sleeping...  well...  some sleeping and a lot of tossing and turning.  The pain is keeping me from sleeping all that well.  At this point, the lawn needs cutting again but I know my knee cannot handle that yet without making my knee worse...  again.

My spinal pain is worse than usual but that really isn't unexpected since I'm not moving around as much as I should.  I'm also not doing any of my usual daily physical therapy because I'm staying off my knee.  The spinal pain gets so bad that breathing in deeply hurts quite a lot.  Breathing deeply moves my ribs and my ribs are attached to my spine so my spine moves...  ugg...  and it hurts, a lot, so breathing hurts.  Lying down most of the day and night does not help any spinal injuries either but, unfortunately, that is what I have been needing to do lately because of the knee injury.

So, I'm again favoring my right leg because of my knee injury which means my left leg is taking a bit of abuse.  Favoring my right leg is again affecting the left ankle injury which had me laid up for about four months earlier in the year.  Due to recurring pain in my left ankle, I've gone back to wearing a brace on my ankle at times.  The snowball rolling down this hill seems to be quickly gaining momentum.  

Still a bit of swelling on the left side of my right knee.

Yesterday, I stepped outside after lunch so I could water the flowers in our planters and window boxes and I immediately realized that my legs hurt badly...  I mean badly...  my legs felt as though I had run a marathon yesterday.  The muscles were very sore and I was quite weak.  I don't know how else to describe it other than to say I was simply feeling quite lousy.  

I went back inside and all these problems with pain were weighing on my mind because I couldn't put my finger on the root cause.  Could it be because I'm not doing anything lately except elevate my leg with ice on my knee?  Could it be because I have not been able to do any physical therapy for the past week?  Could it just be spinal pain from my extensive spinal injuries causing pain to run down my legs too?  Could it be a more serious underlying condition?  While I was tossing around all sorts of possible causes through my scattered thoughts, I dozed off for an hour or so.  

When I awoke, I realized that perhaps I should check my O2 level again.  I last checked my O2 level about a week ago and my O2 was in the upper 80s which is horrendous.  Anything below 96% is considered alarming.  This time it was at around the 91-92% level.  Hmmm...  this prompted me to wonder if maybe my muscles are so sore because I haven't been getting enough oxygen to the muscles?  This low oxygen level in my blood could also account for my overwhelming fatigue and generally feeling lousy.  

I used my inhaler a couple of times...  my O2 level only rose to around 93-94% but I was beginning to feel more "normal".  This morning, I'm feeling a bit better than yesterday but still not great.  At this point it is pretty obvious that the low O2 level was causing overwhelming fatigue and very sore muscles.  

Today I think I'm going to continue focusing on icing my knee and elevating my knee but I'm also going to add a bunch of extra medications throughout the day and tonight.  It is possible that my mast cells are wreaking havoc on my body...  everywhere and not just in one area which is what typically occurs. 

I should also mention that as lousy as I'm feeling and as much pain as my knee and spine are causing me all day and all night long, I've definitely felt far worse many, many, many times due to my primary illness.  Let me put it this way...  If I always waited around, doing nothing, for my health to improve enough to feel well, I'd never get a single thing accomplished...  not even cleaning myself or preparing meals.  Honestly, I feel lousy everyday.  What is keeping me lying down this year (so far...  I'd take 2020 back again in a heartbeat!) has been this ankle injury followed by the knee injury.  I've definitely felt far worse than I do now...  I'd even say that I've definitely felt far worse than I do now on most days.  That being said, this knee and ankle pain is cutting into my sleep and getting old.

Now, it is just past noon and I am so exhausted that I don't even want to make lunch...