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This past Saturday, April 15th, was hardly the fun day I had hoped it to be.

All day the previous day and Saturday I had been dealing with arthritic pain in my toes. On the classic pain scale of 1 thru 10 I would report that it had been hovering around a 3 for both days. Painful, enough to be particularly aware of it, but so intense that I needed to take special actions because of it.

This past Saturday was also the next session of my tabletop roleplaying game, Space Opera, and I was looking for to the new adventure I had crafted for the players as I became more comfortable managing the game over zoom.

It started off well enough. True we were down one player, later I learned it was due to a mistake in the calendar, but we were having fun and all my pre-game work seemed to be on point.

But then the arthritic pain in my toes began spiking. What had been a fairly constant 3 suddenly climbed into the territory of 6 or 7 with bursts to 8. Tears welled in my eyes, and I found myself needed to stop and massages my toes in a vain attempt to relieve the agony. It became too constant to allow me to think coherently for more than a few minutes at a time. I was forced to end our game session two hours ahead of what I had hoped with the central murder-attempt mystery just unveiled, and deal exclusively the arthritis in my toes. (It’s in other joints as well but the toes are always the first to flare.)

I found some relief by elevating my feet and keeping the fluid pressure down. Between 4 hours of elevation and some ibuprofen around midnight the pain had subsided back to the usual constant 2. A background level I have learned to live with over the last ten years.

I am bitterly disappointed and ashamed that I could not provide the entertainment for my friends that I had worked and planned for and hope that next session will be much better.