Now You Feel It, Now You Don’t
When I was about nine years old and already living in a twelve-year-old’s body, I was playing street football in our crackerbox development in Madison, Wisconsin. Those were lean graduate school days for my mother and family, and I either didn’t have a proper pair of sneakers or was too lazy to go home and put them on, so I was wearing leather-soled tie shoes when I went to punt the football to my opposing team. I recall a scene that looked like when Lucy pulls the football away from Charlie Brown. I kicked and proceeded to slip of the asphalt thanks to those leather soles and my legs completely went out from under me as I landed with a thud on my back in the street. I learned two lasting lessons from that fall. The first was what it felt like to get the wind knocked out of you. That really is a startling feeling that is both primordial and eye-popping all at once. Once you regain your breathing capability, which is usually within the several minutes it takes to see your young life flash before your eyes, you tend to realize that you will always remember this feeling and avoid like the plague anything that can cause it to recur. The second lesson was about what a backache could feel like.
As a man of formidable bulk for my entire life, and as a man who operated on the physical activity plane like any other young man and even occasionally at he outer edge of that, it would be surprising if I hadn’t occasionally done some degree of injury to my back. The back is the fundamental support structure for the body and given the placement of the central nervous system in its midst, it is the place from which all physical discomfort emanates. We all know the feeling that when your back isn’t right, very little about your day goes well. And you would logically think that a person of bulk like me would be in the back hospital all the time, when that has not really been the case. My football fall did send me to the chiropractor, but that experience did not yield a particular sense of closure and I don’t know that it even made me feel that much better. As I think about my other injuries as I was growing up, I may have had an occasional sore back, but it was not a dominant cause of discomfort or disability to me. The next time I recall having a back problem was in my twenties when I wrenched it lifting something. I recall getting on the carpeting to help straighten it out only to find that I almost couldn’t get up again, but that too passes in short order. Again, in my thirties I had travelled to London and something about the ride hadn’t sat well with my back and my complaints to a friend from London drew the suggestion of seeing an osteopath he knew.
That osteopath was actually, at the time, the osteopath to Princess Diana, which certainly made me feel special. He told me that I was seriously out of adjustment and that he would normally work on me gradually over several visits to get me back in line, but since I was not in London for long, he would do the full adjustment that day. The caveat he gave me was that I would feel like shit that afternoon but then wake up the next day without any pain. I was dubious to say the least, but that is exactly how it happened. I guess his three months per year in Nepal served him well in the learning of his craft.
Then, again in my forties, I got a dose of backache. My doctor at NYU was actually an osteopath, so I went to see him and took an MRI. What came back was what most often seems to come back to me on medical tests, that I was just fine and that there was surprisingly little damage to my spine from all my years of abuse and neglect. Once again, whatever drove me to see him passed and my back was back.
When we first moved out here to the hilltop five years ago, I went to a local chiropractor, or more accurately a chiropractic practice that operated on a package subscription basis, and I tentatively every week or two until COVID hit. During COVID we all got by just fine without service providers including chiropractors. Since then I haven’t had more than an occasional twinge in my back until a week ago. I’ve had the benefit of weekly deep tissue massages and, for the past year, twice weekly stretches. That all changed a week ago.
Somewhere in the middle of dealing with a migrating hip twinge, I got attacked by a lower right back pain that felt unusually pervasive and somewhat threatening. I sometimes get a backache from standing around or walking, and may have kicked this one off during a 10,000 step day on the Virginia Beach boardwalk. In any case, its been a week and all my PT-driven exercises seem to help in the moment, but the back is back all too soon. The last two nights it has talked to me most of the night and only slightly subsides momentarily, so it officially bothering me now. I went on YouTube for answers and got some more stretches and exercises, which I dutifully did and just now went and swam twenty laps, which they say is very good for sciatic nerve pain. That is what I believe this pain to be, sciatica. Its something we have all heard about, but until you feel it,you have no idea how annoying it can be. My online research tells me it can take 4 to 6 weeks to go away and is usually caused by a bulging or herniated disk. The timeframe does not sound scary, but the disk thing does.
I always think that pain is as much a psychological trip as it is physical. I’m no zen master, but I do sense in the middle of the night that if I am lying with sciatic pain running down my leg, that I can force myself to put it out of my mind. None of that keeps me off a good clinical dose (800mg) of Advil, but I actually do think I can talk myself out of the discomfort and fall asleep sometimes. The problem is that that takes a lot of energy and focus to do or else complete distraction. If something else more pressing has to be attended to, its funny how pain like sciatica can fade into the background. That is one of the convincing arguments that you can talk yourself out of it when you need to.
In the past six months I have gone from having a hunky right hip that occasionally woke me up. I was convinced that my stretching helped that go away. Then, as I headed over to Asia, I suddenly saw that go away and the left hip kick in with a vengeance that made stair walking painful. After three months of no success in stretching myself out of that one, I went to a PT who gave me a few new and specific exercises and characterized it as a strain of the gluteus medius. Amazingly enough, several days of doing those simple and fairly intuitive exercises that coincided with our trip to Virginia Beach, that too suddenly went away, but left in its wake this return of the right hip issue with the added pleasure of the sciatic pain. What’s up with all these roving aches and pains? Some will suggest its overcompensation on my part, which is not without some merit.
At the end of the day, when Kim asks me if I want to go to an orthopedist, I am shocked at the suggestion. I consider that a distant last stop in this journey, one which I am very hesitant to take at all. I know where that ends and it’s usually at the end of a scalpel. I take pride in saying that I operate on all original equipment and its going to take more than a few sleepless nights to change that for me. I know these things can go as easily as they come and yet again, that is what I am choosing to count on.