reluctantly slowing down

I've been pretty diligent with my daily goal of 3000 words. However, the extra sitting and typing isn't doing my neck and shoulder much good. Neither is long stretches of cello practice. In fact, all that is making it worse.

The neck and shoulder pain has been bothering me off and on since the last week of October. It led to an adventure on Wednesday evening. When I was driving home from work, the ache started radiating up to my ear and was making my right arm feel a bit tingly. I had considered getting a doctor's appointment, but the soonest mine can see me is the 28th. Then I considered going to urgent care to see if I could get some pain meds to tide me over until I could see my doctor, but I wasn't sure if this qualified as "urgent." I called the 24/7 nurseline number on my insurance card, and I told the nurse that I'd had this pain off and on for three weeks. I asked if it would be appropriate to go to urgent care.

She said I should call 911 because those symptoms could be heart attack.

This is not a good thing to tell someone with a history of panic attacks. Most of me didn't think I was having a heart attack, but a teeny bit of me started to worry about it because of the family history of heart problems. It was really hard not to listen to that teeny bit, especially when the nurse was so insistent that I call 911.

I realize it's a CYA mentality for the nurse and the insurance company to assume the worst so as not to appear negligent. On the other hand, the nurse discounted much of what I told her, and took the neck pain radiating to ear and arm out of context as the only important things to consider.

So panicky me calls 911, the EMTs show up, I tell them what's going on, they take my vitals, and they tell me they don't think I'm having a heart attack. However, they said if I wanted to go to the ER, they'd be glad to take me. At which point I said I would go, because the only thing that was going to stop me panicking was a doctor telling me that I'm not having a heart attack. They understood, and were as nice as could be about the whole thing. I appreciated that.

I was in the ER for four hours, grappling with waves of panic on top of the neck and shoulder pain. I finally saw a nurse practitioner. She felt around my neck and shoulders, and when she pressed on a particular spot, I could feel the tingling in my right arm. She decided on X-rays, which turned up negative for anything overt that she was looking for, like a bone spur, so she diagnosed it as a pinched nerve, not a heart attack, and recommended that I see an orthopedist. She also gave me a prescription for Flexeril. I've only taken it at night, and while it helps me sleep, I go through most of the next day feeling groggy and drugged. Don't like that.

I saw an orthopedist on Friday, and I've been prescribed four weeks of physical therapy. The pain is now moving around a bit. On Thursday, it felt like it was pulling down on the inside of my ears. Yesterday, it had moved to the back of my neck and radiating up to the crown of my head. Sometimes, I feel it down further in my right shoulder blade. It's less sharp than it has been, but it's still there. And it's affecting how much time I can spend sitting at a desk comfortably writing.

I've reached 50,000 words on this writing project, so I've met the official NaNoWriMo goal, but I have to slow down the writing pace because of the neck and shoulder pain. This means I won't reach 90,000 words by the end of the month.

I'm very disappointed. I can work on it into December, of course, but I had really latched on to the idea of getting the entire first draft done in a month. It's taken the wind out of my sails to keep working on it at all. In fact, the only reason I have any desire to continue with it is because there's some good stuff that's come out onto the page, and I want to see what happens. It also feels like the story is going to be longer than I'd anticipated. This isn't a bad thing, and who knows what will happen in the editing phase when I start ruthlessly chopping stuff out?

I will still keep posting my daily word counts on Twitter until I finish this draft, and thank you so much to everyone who has popped in to ask how the writing's going and to find out the latest word count. I appreciate it muchly.