Human Barometer

Recently I've made several comments about being a human barometer. Yesterday I had someone ask me what I mean by that. Here is my explanation.

My body is not the greatest. I've often joked that I am 30 years old with the aches and pains of an 80 year old! Over the course of my life I have had injuries that have left large amounts of scar tissue throughout my body. This combined with the high amounts of inflammation I have cause me to have pain when the weather changes.

When the weather is nice (meaning the sun is shining, the temperature is normal for that time of year and the sky is not cloudy) the barometric pressure is usually pretty close to 30. On days when the weather is a little drab/crappy the pressure can drop to around 99.75 and when it's really bad like a big storm or front coming in it can go as low as 99.5.

I can pretty much identify when the barometer gets below 99.8. On those days I start to feel pain.

-It begins in my feet (Mainly because that is my most recent injury.) My feet will ache, almost as if I've spent an entire day standing in bad shoes, only I haven't. Every step is painful.

-Then my shoulders will ache, like I've been lifting my arms up and down doing jumping jacks for hours. They will burn like they have been overused.

-My low back will also start to ache. At first it will be a dull ache but will get worse as the pressure gets lower.

-My neck also gets tight. After a few hours of this it will turn into a tension headache which can only be helped by sleep, or lying on a special wedge I have to relax the muscles.

-If I'm doing an activity that uses my arms a lot on these days (like playing guitar) my wrists and forearms will hurt as well.

-When it is really bad my hips will hurt as well.

My "human barometer" days can vary from experiencing one thing on that list to a combination of things to all of those things. It's not fun but I am unfortunately used to it. Recently we have been experiencing bad weather. For the past week we have had several thunderstorms that were worse than I've seen in years! The storms were cool! The effect they had on my body were not! My feet are still recovering.

Today was beautiful, the weather was wonderful, and the pressure was around 99.87.

I was a happy girl today!