First to consider, I suppose, is the age-old question: the chicken or the egg: which came first? An interesting intellectual exercise, no doubt, but isn’t the energy expended in trying to decipher this dilemma rather futilely spent?

How about if we let folks with more time on their hands tinker around with this particular debate, ok?

Next up: Nick Hornby asks, in his thought-provoking novel High Fidelity, when considering some of his favorite songs (“Only Love Can Break Your Heart,” “When Love Breaks Down,” “How Can You Mend a Broken Heart,” “I Just Don’t Know What to Do With Myself,” etc.): “[w]hat came first—the music or the misery? Did I listen to music because I was miserable? Or was I miserable because I listened to music? Do all those records turn you into a melancholy person?” (pp. 24-25)

Again, more of life’s great questions that I think I’ll leave to the pundits and amateur therapists & philosophers out there who focus on our popular culture.

All of this is just a weak lead-in to where I’m really going with this self-reflective, self-indulgent discourse today: my own questions about chronic pain and depression. In a 2003 Stanford University study, not surprisingly, the correlation between chronic pain and depression was found to be quite high: sufferers of one likely needed treatment for both. “The question now is which comes first: the depression or the pain,” they asked. Of course, I think it likely works both ways. For example, just as depression is common among individuals who suffer from lower-back pain, it also appears to be true that depressed individuals can develop lower-back pain.

In my case, I have lived rather my entire life wondering about such issues. After approximately 40 years of chronic physical pain (beginning in my early 20s), the downturns to my physical self are quite typically mirrored in a mood decline. And, then again, when an outside entity or event exerts a change to my emotional well-being, my body almost always follows. The peaks and valleys for my affective state completely parallel my physical ups and downs.

In sum, this serves to remind me that I need to revisit a book I started a little while back, and then subsequently got sidetracked from…Why Zebras Don’t Get Ulcers: The Acclaimed Guide to Stress, Stress-Related Diseases, and Coping. It’s a rather large and scary tome, but valuable information is contained therein, nonetheless. I need more of what’s in there, I think.

I was reflecting today on the myriad of Thanksgiving Days I’d spent alone, and on some that I’d spent with special people in my life. One of the most memorable was twenty years ago today: Thanksgiving Day 1986…isn’t it amazing how time flies.[ohmygod: Ronald Reagan was president on that day!] It was surely an entirely different world for me then.

I was living in Corvallis at the time, as I had for the previous 16 years. I had moved there to go to grad school in chemistry at Oregon State University (OSU) during the summer of 1970, and continued to reside there after I finished up that advanced degree; it had become home more than anyplace ever had. Although I arrived in Corvallis as a college graduate, I actually did a whole lot of my “growing up” in that town during my 20s and 30s. I was divorced there in 1978. I started my own path of personal growth and development in a serious way there when I entered therapy with Linda Carroll in 1980. I began the OSU master’s degree program in counseling in 1982. I went through an alcohol diversion program there in 1983-84 as part of my DUII experience. And I met J there in 1985.

Linda and J are two of the (top three) people that have had the most influence on my life’s path. With J, it was in the form of a significant-other relationship that lasted a couple of years, encompassing that Thanksgiving Day twenty years ago.

J had just separated from her husband in late October that year, and ended up living in the same apartment complex as me. When she left her marriage the nature of our relationship dramatically changed, and we were in a very close and intense phase by Thanksgiving. As I recall, we rented about six or eight movies to watch that weekend; it was in the time before we even owned our own VCR, so, I remember, we rented the machine to play the movies as well. (Ah, the good old days!) I only remember one of the movies we watched that day, namely Sophie’s Choice. Very moving.

It was a gray and wet and cold weekend outside, but it was a close and intimate one in: characterized by a level of comfort and care and celebration that I have rarely found in my life, before or since.

It was exactly a year ago when I started my blog. On that 2005 Day-of-the-Turkey, I’m pretty sure when I got up that morning, I did not know that that was the day I was going to begin this journey. But, at some point, as I sat home alone, I did a little exploring on the internet, browsing a few blogs out there that were being published by “ordinary folks” like me, and decided that this was something I could try. Amazingly, I’ve been at it ever since. And, some of you have been readers ever since I let you know I was doing this. For that, I thank you a whole bunch!

I published 150 posts to the first version of TechnoMonk’s Musings between November 24, 2005, and October 25, 2006. Those entries are still available at technomonk.us. In the days since I abandoned that blog for this one with a new look and feel, I’ve added 18 new posts here at technomonksmusings.com. Hence, the stats come out to 168 entries in the past 365 days, for an average of one post every 2.2 days. Not bad for a rookie, I guess!

On an otherwise cold, gray, blustery, wet and miserable day, a few rays of sunshine poke through during the late afternoon. If sunshine and warmth are possible on a day like this, anything is…

I know, I know: this sounds uncharacteristically optimistic of me, doesn’t it!?

In my most recent entry regarding the experiment with low-dose Naltrexone (LDN), I mentioned that there seemed to be some improvement in my CMP (chronic myofascial pain) symptoms, though I had, at the same time, developed some additional pains after 12 days on the drug. Here’s another report on my LDN experience.

I believe the LDN trial was probably worthwhile, but, for me, it just didn’t work out. The additional pain symptoms overtook any possible gains I was noticing just one day after my last report. So, after 13 consecutive nights on the drug, I discontinued it for the next two. Amazingly, after backing away from the medication for just that short period of time, the tendonitis symptoms in my arms began to recede. I had been reading on the LDN listerve that some individuals need to start LDN at an even lower dose (1.5 mg per night) than I had been taking (3 mg) in order for the body to adjust. So I started back on the drug, taking one pill every other night for the next two weeks (another 7 pills). All told, I took 20 of the 30 pills I had been prescribed, though I have now stopped altogether.

I am completely distressed to report that I am in worse shape than when I started; the last pill I took was six nights ago and I’m still looking for an improvement in the new and additional pain symptoms that ultimately resulted. Although my arms have seemingly recovered, I am now experiencing more back pain than ever before, and in new locations. It has me rather scared about what I may have done to myself, though the dose of the drug was so low and the time period so short, I’m hoping that if these new symptoms are at all related to the drug (and not to the hugely increased stress in my life in the last week), then I can look forward to the pain backing off in the next few days. However, as of yet that has not happened, and the pain level is really getting in the way of normal life. I took a day and a half away from work this last week because of it, and I’m likely going to need some more time away tomorrow if I can get in for an appointment with my chiropractor in Eugene. I have decided that I need help to deal with this.

My advice to anyone trying the LDN approach is to be very watchful and mindful of what you’re doing. At the first sign of unpleasant side effects (which are supposed to be practically non-existent, but in my case was not so), critically evaluate what you might be doing with/to your body. LDN was not approved for many of the things it’s being used to treat. Be careful out there.