Ode to My Shoulder

The two worst joints on my body are my left knee and my right shoulder. Today I'd like to focus on my shoulder, since it's driving me absolutely crazy right now.

If you're a normal reader, you know already that I love baseball - the smell of the grass and leather, the pinstripe pants, playing catch with Theron - even if I don't quite understand every single thing about the game quite yet. When I started playing catch with Theron, I noticed that my shoulder wasn't hurting as much. I got better at catch and wasn't in as much pain - for me it's a win-win situation.

Sadly, with there being a wind chill advisory from the National Weather Service, I'm not in a rush to go out and play catch. With that said, who says you can't play catch in the house? Yeah, my mom said that too. As long as you're not actually throwing something, you should be fine though right? Normally, if I work my shoulder like a pitcher, it feels a lot better. Sometimes I don't even have to take medicine, which is always nice.

Sometimes, though, the pitching exercise approach doesn't always work... and given the fact that I can't just stop moving my shoulder between work, school, and my everyday activities, there's not a whole lot more I can do... Or is there?

Ice and wraps usually do the job when exercises won't work. It's harder to take care of a shoulder problem, however, since there's no easy way to wrap it and keeping ice on it is really difficult. On top of that, there's really no comfortable position to keep my shoulder in so that it doesn't hurt. The other bad thing about the arthritis affecting my shoulder so terribly is that the effects usually do spread down into my arm or up into my back and neck. For instance, my forearm is aching something fierce (I feel like I'm 87, so why not talk like I am?). Occasionally - and this is probably not a good sign - my elbow or forearm will go numb from the pain.

It makes it hard to conduct my everyday activities, especially during school. I am right-handed, so that really doesn't help my situation. I have a feeling though that if I was left-handed, my left shoulder would be in pain. I'm lucky enough to have friends at work who will help push my arm until it pops the right way again. This method doesn't work so well, but it helps to relieve the pain for a short while at least.

With time and rest, this feeling generally will go away. It just always takes way more time than I'd like.

NOTE: Since my monster post, I grew less lazy and bought some multi-vitamins. I've only been taking them for about three days, so I can't say that I've had a remarkable change quite yet. I really hope that it helps get my body the nutrition that it desperately needs.

ANOTHER NOTE: You may have noticed that more of my posts lately are related to my disease. I hope that by blogging about my JRA pains I might be able to help other people. Plus, I've been told it's pretty interesting to read about. I will still blog about the news and politics here and there, so don't fret!