Dyet Yarns: reuse, recycle, reinvent!

Going to the Doctor is sort of an ordeal for me. As a student with basically zero income, I despise paying someone money to tell me what I already know. Because of this, I generally only go when there is something the Doc can do that I cannot – like prescribe painkillers.

My rotator cuff has been inflamed and complaining since I was stupid and spindled for a few days straight. No, I do not mean I spindled a little each day. Hours each day, with no breaks for stretches of 4 or more hours… you can see why my shoulder hurts. Doing anything that uses repetitive motions for that long without breaks is a terrible idea. Don’t do it.

For about a week, my shoulder has been hurting, I have been wearing a sling or ace bandage, and ibuprofen has been a welcome visitor in my diet. Monday morning I realized it wasn’t getting better. The pain was, in fact, getting worse. As was my grumbling and ability to do much of anything. Of course, I knew the doc would say it needed rest and ibuprofen, so why go pay money for that advice?

Finally, P cannot stand it any longer.

I explained to him for the umpteenth time why I was not going to see a doctor. They always tell me what I already know, and if I don’t know the problem then they usually can’t figure it out either. They do like to do lots of expensive tests, but they have not once diagnosed any of my mystery problems. When I caught Mono, became gluten-intolerant, had a pinched sciatic nerve… all of those problems made the doctors scratch their heads (or flat out argue against my mother), and then the tests all turned out positive. Way to go, medical profession.

I explained to P exactly what would happen if I went to urgent care.

Now, I am not some homeopathic, hippie quack. I like science, I like medicine, and I like competent doctors. I’ve just had lousy luck trying to find a competent doctor, and I don’t want to pay a gajillion dollars to bad docs in order to find a good one. Plus, I am a stubborn git who is broke.

P is equally stubborn and tired of my whining, so he comes up with the cleverest of clever plans.

…and that is how I ended up at urgent care today.

Dyet Yarns blog posts by Adrian "Nuri" Steinhauer are licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States License.

Tags: broken, doctor, Knitting, rsi, shoulder, spinning, tour de fleece