Arthritis

Well, it turns out that doing a lot of kneeling in a 90-minute yoga class can cause a swollen bursa that brings a lot of pain.  I've been babying the right knee but finally went to the doctor for x-rays.  The right knee has two bone spurs on the right and one larger bone spur on the left and the bursa is swollen.  The doctor said the swollen bursa is normally caused by kneeling and the only kneeling I've done recently was in that yoga class.  The doctor advised me to stay away from yoga for the time being.

And last week I decided -- for the millionth time -- to give up coffee because it is causing me to have extreme tremors.  So I stopped coffee around the same time I took the yoga class.  Over the course of the next few days the tremors stopped, but I also developed extreme joint pain -- especially the hips -- and when I did some internet searches one thing that I came up with was caffeine withdrawal.  Caffeine withdrawal can cause a myriad of side effects that can last 7 to 14 days.  The sciatica has let up a bit so I'll wait it out and see what 14 days brings.

I did a bit more "surfing" and came up with a blog of someone who gave up caffeine and they were recording each day of withdrawal.  Sciatic pain was at the top of his list.  But he included a little blurb that I thought was hilarious:

Once upon a time everyone woke up and all the coffee in the world had vanished. In the next week all companies went bankrupt except panadol and ibuprofen. Everybody got divorced or killed someone. Nobody blogged or did any study. Children took over the world and the remaining parents didn't care about that or anything else. The end.