Living with fibromyalgia

One of the symptoms of my fibromyalgia has been severe debilitating abdominal pain . The pain management doctor I was seeing suggested trying a sympathetic lumbar nerve block. In a block is a fairly common procedure in pain management and there are tons of patient experiences out there. So instead of going into details, I will summarise the differences in experience that I had from what others had described. For starters, I was under the impression that every doctor injects at the same nerve root level in the procedure. However, my pain management doctor said that depending on my symptoms, he will consider injecting different nerve roots. This means that you may receive one or more injections. Most of the other patients seem to have not experienced pain. However, even after the anaesthetic, I experienced painful heavy sensation after each injection. After the procedure, I was not able to turn on the side where the injections at been made. Fortunately, the pain reduced rapid...

Patients with chronic pain often benefit from exercise. However, it is important to do the exercise properly otherwise it can end up doing more harm than good. I have been dealing with lower back pain and abdominal pain for quite some time now. Every time I used to stretch my quadriceps, I would start getting some back pain also. The video below clearly explains why along with stretching the quadriceps, you may put strain on your lower lumbar region. After using the technique mentioned here, I no longer get the pain and and therefore recommending it to everyone. I also recommend subscribing to this channel because the trainer, who also claims to be a physiotherapist, first explains the anatomy and the function of each muscle and then designs the exercise. That way, you can be conscious of what part of the body you are putting stress on and can avoid it if you are experiencing pain in that area.

I recently underwent ketamine infusion for chronic pain. I thought I would share my experience for those who are considering this procedure to manage their symptoms of chronic pain and fibromyalgia. There is plenty of information about ketamine infusions on the web. For those who are new to this, here is a link that may be beneficial. Personally, I was motivated by this blog post. Unfortunately, the ketamine infusion did not help me but at the same time, I must state that I did only to sessions and the doctor discontinued because he thought that it would not help. I'm still hopeful that may be it may help if the doctor agrees to continue the entire course of 4 to 6 sessions. The infusions were done for me as an outpatient procedure. This meant that every day I had to be at the hospital at 9 AM to complete the paperwork and all formalities. The breakfast had to be light. The procedure actually started around 10 AM and lasted for about 4 hours. After that, there was one hour...

If you're travelling outside your city within India and are a customer of airtel, you can ask them to put your account in what is called as "safe custody". This is a value-added service provided by airtel where the customer will be charged a nominal amount for the duration of the "safe custody" period while the services will remain disconnected. In December 2016, the charges Rs. 500 and the maximum duration is 90 days. After 90 days, you will have to call again in order to re-enable "safe custody". However, there have been some complaints about it this way the company actually ended up disconnecting the service altogether. I am keeping my fingers crossed on this account. The cable TV services like Tata and dish TV also provide this facility. Dish TV does not charge anything during the duration of service disconnection. Service providers like BSNL do not seem to have this kind of a facility.

If you use TENS or any similar electrotherapy device to manage pain, you may be using self adhesive electrodes. The adhesive usually wears off after using the electrodes for a few times and then you will have to purchase another set of electrodes. Depending on the manufacturer and your usage pattern, the cost of these electrodes may become more than $ 50 per month. To make the adhesive last longer, follow these three simple steps: Purchase an ultrasound gel container. For example, you can buy this at Amazon for about $ 7. Apply a thin layer of gel on the electrode  Refrigerate for about half an hour. The electrode will recover its adhesive property. After use, you can keep the electrodes in the refrigerator if you want.  With this method, I have been able to almost double the life of the electrodes that I use with my TENS unit.

In this Dragon NaturallySpeaking tutorial , I show how one can list and choose a file from a list of files in a directory assuming that you know the first few letters of the name of the file. I frequently encounter this situation especially when I'm trying to attach a file in Microsoft Outlook. The Windows dialogue box that comes up has got limited space and the file that I want to attach may be not visible. Scrolling down in a directory which contains a lot of files is pretty tedious. In most cases, I do remember the first few letters of the file and that is why I tend to use this often. Here is a YouTube video that explains how to do this:

In this Dragon NaturallySpeaking tutorial , I will explain how you can compose and send an email hands-free in Microsoft Outlook using Dragon NaturallySpeaking Premium version 13 . However, this applies to other versions also including Dragon NaturallySpeaking professional version 15. Sending and receiving emails is probably one of the most common tasks you will do.Dragon Naturally Speaking  is very well suited to accomplish. Typing long emails can be stressful to your hands. Using speech recognition along with ergonomic devices and posture correction can help reduce the risk of  chronic pain due to repetitive stress injury . For a complete beginner, as I was several years ago, it  takes some time to figure out the steps. So I have made cookbook style YouTube videos to explain this. As a first step, you will probably like to put the email addresses of the recipients in the Microsoft Outlook contacts. The video below explains how to do thi...