heat

Being warm enough makes it easier for me to cope with pain and other kinds of stress. I only started noticing it the winter I started taking Topamax, so I don't know if I would need more heat than the rest of the world if I weren't trying to cope with chronic pain. As it is, sometimes I am so cold-sensitive it's embarrassing. I work in a large building where the priorities are frequent air exchange and aggressive air filtration, and I recognize that makes the place hard to heat in cold weather.

The temperature at my desk is probably about 55-60F, with a moderate breeze. I can remember thinking of that as a mild spring day. I can remember feeling relaxed at such temperatures, with no jacket, and maybe even with short sleeves. (Just not in recent years.) I still resent it when I'm shivering in a turtleneck and heavy sweater, and my colleagues seem comfortable in short sleeves or light dress shirts. Sometimes they even have sweaters draped over the backs of their chairs, in case of need. There is one colleague who complains of the cold, and keeps a space heater at her desk, but I am embarrassed on her behalf...if she wants to wear clothes that show so much skin, and if she really wants to call attention to it, surely there must be a more dignified way to go about it? Well, maybe there isn't.

Yesterday, I tried something different. I put one of those single-use heating pads, the kind with the adhesive backing, on my bad shoulder under my shirt. The heat source is a very fine powder which is supposed to react with air and gradually release heat over 6-8 hours. (It's the same idea as those handwarmer thingees to put in your pocket. They get somewhat hotter if they're exposed to more air when you take off the package, but they last longer wrapped in cloth.) The heating pads are sold for use with sore muscles, on the premise that even people who aren't cold all the way through are more comfortable with heat on specific achy bits. I'm not sure if it was helping me in that direction, or if it was just helping avoid cold-induced muscle spasms and the overall difficulty coping that comes with being cold. It did help, some.

lifestyle changes

Now I have a full-time job. This is supposed to be good for me.

I am physically tired much more of the time. I am getting much less exercise than I used to. Practically none, really. It's hard to find time and energy to even do the PT stretches for my shoulder.

Minute to minute, driving is as much of a strain as I thought it would be. I can't multitask well enough to listen to audiobooks or talk on the phone while I drive. It even increases the strain substantially to deal with the GPS while I drive. (And the GPS is unreliable enough that I need to map out at least one route to anywhere I plan to go, and have directions on paper. But the GPS turns out to be good for when that fails.) It's not that the commute is so terribly long. Day to day, the cumulative strain is getting to me pretty badly. My boss made it clear that he expects me to drive to work, that he considers driving my own car to work to be an essential qualification to doing this job on a probationary basis. I resented that for a few days, before realizing I would usually need to take my car in any case--every time I have an early morning meeting at work, or a some kind of late afternoon or early evening appointment in Cambridge or Somerville or darkest Waltham, I would need to drive. It's not that the commute is so terribly long. It's about an hour of driving each way, when I don't have to deal with snow or traffic jams. When my commute was 20 minutes walk + 20 minutes on a bus + 20 minutes walk, it took more time (counting the wait time)...but it was much less of a physical and emotional strain.

When I write something, now, I need to go back through it and take out all the inappropriate obscenities. Email to colleagues. Notes to my sweeties. Grocery lists. Political letters. I wonder if this is some kind of displaced road rage, or if I'm just looking for another way to express the old familiar stress, now that my fingernails are pretty well gone.