Nerve pain, the kind you cannot escape even with aggressive pain relief management, has recently decided to crescendo in my life. Generally I'm not the type to complain about pain or seek medical help unless it's sever, but last week I found myself in the emergency room with a deeply persistent pain and high degree of numbness / weakness in my dominant hand and arm, radiating all the way down to numb thumb and index finger.
The doctors here were all but useless in diagnosis and even after sending me for x-rays didn't even bother to explain or speculate on what the root of my pain is.. A firm "nothing is broken and therefore you are fine" aura certainly was present, and only a passing mention of physiotherapy was given as a means of treating.. Which lead me down a rabbit hole ultimately leading to the following book:
( ignore the homo-erotic styling of the cover, I swear the book is full of actual good info and not gay literotica )
Through the reading of this book (Pirate the PDF if you need to honestly, author is dead a while now) I managed to narrow down the root cause of my condition and begin to start at home physio therapy. A crash course in the mechanics of the neck and the skeletal / muscle / nerve relation it all has was necessary before I was able to narrow it down exactly.
Unfortunately given the time frame of which I was having symptoms of neck pain leading up to the state of constant grinding, numbness and weakening of the appendage attached to the damaged nerve it's quite possible I'll have to actually have bone spurring removed and artificial disc implants put in place surgically in order to alleviate the constant wearing of my C6 nerve root. All and all I'm at about 25% strength of muscle in the effected dominant arm, it's absolutely crippling to sit upright for any length of time currently and even with aggressive pain management attempts simply put the mechanical damage inflicted internally on the nerves may not only be permanent, but if left untreated could result up to and including complete paralysis of connected parts. Scary as hell.
At 16 I had a car, an old geo storm, and got T-boned by a now deceased friend in his Dodge 3/4 ton truck at 90 km/h.. Obviously had whiplash but was young and didn't think much of the injury... Fast forward a little under 2 decades later and that car crash compounded with bad posture, excessive sitting due to my IT work and years of hard living seem to finally be coming to bare the fruit sown.
Home Treatment of Serious Degenerative Bone Disease
Traction / stretching and being cognoscente of my posture as well as not only taking steps to prevent further damage, but also finding means of making it so the pain itself doesn't have an incredibly negative effect on my life has challenge. By time I'm able to get enough pain relief to relax the tension in the neck I'm so mentally dulled from the medicine it makes it difficult to work in any intellectual capacity. Currently trying to 3D print and correctly form a neck brace to be worn at all times in order to take the downwards weight compressing and bulging my herniated disk crushing my nerve, first prototype was good but the dimensions were off slightly so made adjustments and am re-printing now. If anyone is interested in the 3D model to print themselves a brace, let me know in the comments and I'll host the files on one of my servers.
Have Experience in Crippling Nerve Pain in the Neck?
Do you have nerve damage based neck pain? And if so how do you cope with and or self treat at home in order to have any sort of quality of life? I wouldn't wish this type of disease and degeneration of vital biomechanical framing on anyone, but would certainly be open to hearing how exactly one copes with this sort of thing short of being hopped up on opiates or having to have the cervical joint of the next surgically removed / replaced / fused. The pain is a stark reminder I'm awake and alive..
But my truly mentally grating and biggest fear in regards to this is that I won't be able to physically lift things or ride motorcycle at all anymore and that I end up paralyzed or with synthetic or cadaver vertebrae fused into my neck.. The old man is like that, same sort of injury that resulted in him having to retire and go under the knife to have 2 cadaver bones fused into his neck.. I call it the family curse, but there has to be some options out there to help avoid being prematurely worn out and forced into a sedentary lifestyle on heavy duty pain killers just to function.
Improvise, Adapt, Overcome... But With Added OUCH
All I know is that the long hours of poor posture in front of my workstation hasn't been conducive to healing or minimizing the damage, feeling compelled to "tough it out" as I'm so far behind on things at the moment it is almost crippling in itself to think about the amount of hours sitting in front of the PC I need to do in order to get things done.. But regardless of the pain and being overwhelmed workload wise I'm going to be making a more concentrated effort to loop back around and get some of the HIVE stuff going here and un-back-burnered.
HL, HSC, HR and some other smaller HIVE centric projects have been opened back up project code side here in the past day or so, was aiming for a end of Q1 resurrections / launch of these things, god willing this is still possible, although I may have to strip out some features and focus on the primary service functions, leaving the frills and extraneous functions on the office floor until I have time and health to dedicate into proper implementation.
HIVE Development Work, You're Golden or Nothing Here
Some folks have been razzing me about the wait on the projects, rightly so, but it's also important to realize that expecting 1 injured and over-worked developer just trying to do what he can to keep things rolling is about all I can do right now, If you want to downvote me due to being impatient or feeling entitled to do so after showing some backing to the development of the projects, go for it, but it sure as shit doesn't make me want to sit through what is effectively crippling pain to try and please people who are going out of their way to stress me out and financially detract some percentage of my potential income.
I'm a bit let down at the rate of development myself and given the grandfathered in "ruling class" of accounts here on HIVE care not to support me in any realistic sort of means it's forced me to take my software engineering skills into other networks. Mostly EVM based stuff as it's the standard now and we aren't there yet.. We by all rights should be, given a few groups, some prominent, some backwater are working on this shit... But alas we are not, although personally working to change this.
It is what it is, I'm not being negligent of the HIVE stuff out of spite or lack of fucks given, it's just that I literally could not afford to continue to spend days coding on HIVE projects that I know will yield great results for the community, but the run up development time on was making financially infeasible to continue on as 100% focus. As it sits HIVE based projects are getting ~30% of my development hours, which is up from the 5% or so that it was privy to months prior. Obligated to deliver the best services and software that I can manifest for the community, both financially and morally..
Plus out of fear that if I don't innovate than those propped into power here will fail to do so, due to not having the financial stresses to drive them to innovate or work long hours.. The lack of my own development work here is underlined boldly, but there is a trend here on HIVE as a whole it seems for developers to either be underappreciated / underpaid, or way the fuck over valued and less than deserving of their position as it was acquired under the guise of development work, which frankly given some of the budgets / income these top rankers possess, should have been feasibly completed in a time scale of a few months, given the proclamations of having teams working on things and the like. :/
Not going to name names or fling shit here trying to cause a scene, ya'll know who you are and what you're doing.. I just wish this system hadn't been set up in such a way to encourage this sort of behaviour, as frankly it's not only unsustainable but also results in extremely little motivation to do anything once you're "to big to fail" stake wise here.. Not sure if oversight on Dan Larimer's part or by design to be honest.. Still think Dan had decent intentions here, but was naïve to think his system wouldn't encourage formation of cartels and some strange oligarchy or some shit.
Comfort Complacency and the Sin of Sloth
There is some truth to the old adage that people without looming stress of starvation or homelessness are far less effective at innovating or working long hours... and given the top rankers here are effectively in a colluded stance with stake large enough to ensure they cannot feasibly be ousted by the community.. well, you get it.. There isn't a lot of motivation to rise to the top when you're already locked in with your buddies and have no pressure to do anything. :/
This past 6 months or more hasn't been great HIVE project development wise, nor as far as health or well being. Things will improve, development will ramp up moreso the more able I am to sit and the more I'm able to financially pad myself from what is effectively chronically underpaid and under appreciated development hell here on HIVE. I only ask for your patience and understanding into this matter and refuse to beg for development subsidies.. A lot of the Web3 / smart contract shit I've been working on with the other networks will be ported over to HSC/HIVE here as well, drastically increasing the chances of when the EVM capable sidechain is ready, that it will have no shortage of applications and services accompanying.
Thanks for reading, please let me know if you've had similar injuries and if so, how you managed to overcome and or self treat the symptoms and root cause.. never been one to woe is me bitch and complain about injuries much, but then again I've also never experienced nerve damage to the point of losing feeling in my hands either.. Given sitting upright in a chair and typing, be it code or shitposts, is how I make a living, this type of injury is less than optimal in so many ways. :/
Are You a Skilled Developer with Cryptography Knowledge?
If there are any GOlang coders reading this and you want to help expedite he HSC development, please let me know. Originally was going to do up the sidechain in Javascript, but frankly it's not a great language for anything handling large volumes of numbers or data streams in this case..
Even a bit of help on the key type conversions and adapting the ENS system to mimic the HIVE account address functionality would drastically help not only my own development push but our community here as a whole. Pay will be lackluster and I can't afford to pay you what you're actually worth outright at the moment in the pursuit of transparency, but if you're willing to work with me and exhibit any sort of aptitude for this sort of engineering it's almost certain that not only do you become legend on this network, but that you'll also be directly in part responsible for shaping the future of this community. <3 Likely would be a contractual / part time / a few days a week at most type thing with compensation paid on either an hourly or by milestone completion type gig.
And with that I'm off to decompress my neck a bit, have some lunch consisting of a bit of toast and juice and going to take some dexamethasone and pray for some relief as I wait for v2 of my neck brace to print. Will try and make a proper update post here sometime today as well, outlining my plan to get things rolling here in the next month, health and healing permitted.
Once again thanks for reading. Cheers to all my supporters and fans, a big old dick in the eye to people bullying me over development timelines and peace and prosperity to the indifferent.