Don't Take a Seat

Someone took my chair at work. I came into the office a few weeks ago and my chair was missing. That was 17th August. It's now the 28th of September and it still hasn't reappeared. The problem is, this isn't just any old chair; it's a specialist ergonomic chair that is set just right for me. It was even labelled with a big sign with my name on it.

Kind of like this. But not this one.

Chairs like this cost an arm and a leg. Okay, not literally, but they are ridiculously expensive and I had to fight tooth and nail 8 years ago to get my employer to buy me one. I pretty much had to argue that £800 for a chair, footstool and ergonomic fitting was cheaper than me going off sick for several months.

So, with my chair missing (but not my footstool, which replaced the old one that also went missing earlier this year), I have been forced to use the bog standard office chairs. In theory, these are adjustable, but half of them are broken in some way and they are too big for my little frame. And they are fucking killing my back. 

The response from the Building Management has been snarky at best. Mine is not the only chair that went missing that day; two others disappeared from my department that day. My manager is pretty pissed off with their responses so far, and today she directly asked them if they will be paying for the replacement. In the meantime, I hurt. Really hurt. A lot. And this really isn't helped by a phantom period shooting down my back.

Amazing how it can still feel like this when I don't have a uterus anymore.

The problems I have with my back are not your standard wear and tear on discs problem. In essence, it's a form of sacro-iliactic joint dysfunction. And it is a literal pain in the bum. 

In short, I have weakness in some of the muscles on the right side of my hip. No amount of strengthening exercises has fixed it. 

This puts pressure on one particular muscle called the piriformis, which goes into extreme spasm. Think of the worst muscle knot you have ever had and stick it in your right bum cheek. Then have this spasm lock your sacro-iliac joint on one side. This joint doesn't have a great deal of movement in it, but its purpose is to act as a shock absorber, kind of in the way that a bridge has a bit of give in it to help it deal with the weight of cars going over it. Then add the inconvenience of your sciatic nerve running along the piriformis muscle. In my opinion, this is one of the human body's greatest design flaws (along with the immune system's ability to start attacking itself).

What caused this mess you say? Endometriosis. The theory is that the years I spent in chronic pain from endo, which always radiated to the right on me, meant that I was probably walking and holding myself oddly to protect the worst affected side. In short, I have screwed up my back and hip muscles protecting myself from the pain of Endometriosis. 

The most important thing I can do for this day to day is to keep moving. Stretching and flexing the troubled muscle regularly is the best thing for it. Good thing I like to walk. However, doing stretches on the office floor is kind of frowned on. Balance the need to keep that joint moving against the sometimes crushing fatigue I experience from Crohn's, and you might start to see the complexity of the problem. 

The trouble is that I need to sit to do my job and sitting in a badly fitting chair will set off the problem in a short period of time. It's not enough to just get up and walk around to stretch; that muscle can start spasming within 10 or 15 minutes. And once the joint locks up, I'm in trouble. 

I can't believe that I actually found this meme!

So, thanks to my missing chair, I am tanked up on co-codomol, burning myself with heating pads and anxiously awaiting an appointment with my osteopath tomorrow. All this while trying to still work and doing battle with Building Management over how my chair went missing in the first place. Oh, and we are also being inspected by Ofsted this week....