My back is just killing me. Well, it’s not literally killing me, but it might as well be. Back pain has taken control of every waking hour of my life and most of my sleep time as well.
It wasn’t that long ago that a sore back just meant popping a couple of extra-strength Tylenol pills, taking a short break, and climbing back into the metaphorical ring. My how things have changed! I’m not sure how it happened but I woke up one morning and I was 50 years older than when I went to bed. At least, that’s how much my back had aged.
After trying a number of different remedies and treatments, I decided to go the medical route with an MRI scan of my spine. The spine is located in your back, which is on the other side of your front, and runs down from your head to your tailbone (which is where your tail used to be when you still had one).
I was lucky to have my MRI scheduled without too long of a waiting period (because of my age and many medical complications, I guess). A major stumbling block was that I was informed that I would have to lie perfectly still, flat on my back for up to 90 minutes during the imaging process. I practised at home and found the longest I could do this was two minutes. Houston, we have a problem. Eventually, we worked our way around the difficulty by getting me to ingest what must have been the equivalent of a handful of elephant tranquilizers. I have no memory of any time spent in the MRI machine, but I do recall foraging in the African Serengeti for acacia tree leaves.
My MRI results showed a total disaster. The pictures revealed that I have severe stenosis of the spine, which means that the spaces inside the spinal canal have narrowed and the spinal cord and associated nerves are being wickedly compressed. In addition, several of the discs which cushion the movement of the vertebrae against each other have disintegrated and a few of the bones in the spine have fused to protect whatever was still intact.
In short, my spine looked like a Lego set that had been partially dismantled before everybody went outside to play. Or you could compare it to a Jenga tower the moment after it begins to collapse. I was informed that although there were certain surgical procedures available that could possibly improve or even fix my spine, at my age and with my disabilities, any neurosurgeon would go running in the opposite direction. My choices were to either go the medication route or have a spinal injection treatment to ease or moderate the pain. Right now, I’m using medications, which might explain my inability to wake up in the morning or keep a coherent thought in my mind for more than a few seconds.
Meanwhile, things have deteriorated even more. Now, the ground seems so much farther away than the sky. The world is conspiring against me by forcing me to have to stoop down to pick up the objects I keep dropping to the floor. The problem is that just when I think I have bent my body downward enough so that my hands should be close enough to reach the dropped item, I discover that my fingers are dangling a foot and several inches above the desired thingamabob. Meanwhile, my spine is pretending it is a bowl of Rice Krispies cereal as it plays accompaniment to my efforts with the familiar crepitating sounds of snap, crackle and pop.
It’s like that game we used to play at the PNE. There was this miniature crane inside a glass enclosed case and a wheel that allowed you to move the crane side to side and its metal claw up or down. Inside the case, seated on a bed of small stones and crushed shells, were a number of semi-valuable trinkets and the big prize: a Rolex watch. You would drop your coin into the machine and carefully manoeuvre the claw so it would drop down directly onto the cherished Rolex. The claw would grab hold of the watch and you would carefully winch it to the exit chute. But, invariably, just as the Rolex was about to be yours, it would slither out of the grasp of the claw and slip back into the case and all you were left with were a few shiny stones and some shell fragments. Well, in my efforts to pick things off the ground, I am the PNE crane.
In the real world, when I finally succeed in getting low enough to grasp the dropped object and attempt to straighten up again to a normal altitude, the damned thing will slip from my fingers to fall once again to the practically unreachable floor. This can happen several times and I sometimes think the gods are amusing themselves with my misfortunes. I must look like a basketball player dribbling the thing I’m trying to retrieve from the floor. Even the cats are in on this cruel game. They deliberately stretch out to their full length so as to lower their bodies closer to the floor and thereby make it all the harder to give them a passing pet.
Putting on my underwear has become a serious challenge. On my first attempt, because I can barely bend at the waist or raise my knees the slightest amount, I often end up with both legs poking through the same leg-hole. Then, when I employ some contortions I learned from Cirque du Soleil, I am able to get each of my legs in a separate leg-hole but my underwear is facing backwards.
Getting in and out of bed has become an exercise that probably equals the logistics needed for the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. Every move has to be carefully planned. It’s like a game of Twister, where placing a hand or knee in the wrong place means certain doom (and a whole lot of pain). For instance, for the final move in getting into bed, which is an act of faith in itself, you must pull your limbs away, straighten up and hope that the mattress is directly below you when you land.
Nobody asked me, but back pain is something you want to avoid if at all possible. It may get you a mobility scooter sooner than you want one. Take care of your back. I wish I had. One thing is for sure; you won’t find me dancing the limbo anytime soon.
