What the fuck?
Completely out of the blue, that was. I hadn't had any sort of warning pains or soreness, nothing at all. Just bent over, and down I went. Have you ever thrown out your back? Hurts just a little bit. You know, just a little. Like every bone in your spine has been ripped out by evil coked-up Keebler elves and replaced with molten pig iron, and every muscle in your back has been infused with candy corn-sized pieces of broken window glass, which have been pre-coated in a solution of 1/3 parts lemon juice, 1/3 parts corrosive spit from one of those monsters from the Alien movies, and 1/3 parts Sarah Palin bile.
So yeah, just a little uncomfortable.
It was a wonderful hour and a half car ride home, and thankfully I was at least a passenger instead of trying to be the driver, but dude. Trying to ride a hundred miles while curled up in a fetal position in a GEO Storm is not something I suggest you try. Getting up the three flights of stairs once we got home and onto our futon was a whole other adventure in pain and agony.
By the way, don't ever sleep on a futon if your back is messed up. As a doctor later informed me, this is a sure way to take all of your painful symptoms and multiply them exponentially to the point where just swallowing that entire bottle of pain medication looks like a completely viable option.
Not that I had any pain medication that time around. See, it was the first time I'd done it. What did I know? I figured it would hurt for maybe a day or so, and then I'd be back up and running again, good as new. I popped aspirin and tried desperately not to have to move, or to have to go to the bathroom (because while it might hurt to have to try to walk to the toilet, actually sitting on it was another circle of hell altogether; let's don't even discuss the joys and wonder of trying to wipe your ass when the only position you can manage that doesn't make you wish you had just died once you hit the tarp is a variation of Fosse's jazz hands as performed by giant radioactive mantis people; no, I don't know what that means, either).
One week. That's how long I was out of work, out of life, out of hope. One week before I could walk around without sweat dripping off my face, before I needed to stop leaning against the wall when I hobbled off to the toilet, before I felt like I was approaching anything resembling a normal level of existence again. I swore to myself that from that point forward, I would treat my back with a love it had never known. I would properly wear my backpack with both arms through the straps, instead of jauntily draping it over one shoulder while I walked around town. I would lift with the legs and not with the back. I would let someone else pick up the goddamn tarp next time. I would be the best back daddy the world had ever known. Nothing but the best for my back from then on out!
Six months later, I tried to get in my car to go to work, and ended up with my feet in the car and my head against the driveway. Nothing more manly than throwing out your back when you are in the process of sitting down!
This time, I went to the doctor, where I learned a couple of very important things. First, no matter how much pain you are in, if you're just at the urgent care with a messed up back, unless you are bleeding from a compound fracture as well, you're just going to have to lay there on the floor and wait your turn. Just because you're sobbing and have crapped yourself from the white hot fingers of exquisite agony that are playing "Saturday Night's Alright for Fighting" on the keys of your spine doesn't mean that you get to cut ahead of the guy that is there to get the results of the cholesterol test that he took last week to see if the Lipitor is working or not. Just suck it up, you baby. And try to keep the whimpering to a minimum; it's creeping out the other patients.
The second thing I learned from this trip is that back medication is soooooooooooooo amazingly fuckingly awesome. The drugs are so fabulous that you almost think it's worth messing up your back in the first place just so you can have a couple dozen pills of instant happy laying around the house, just to take the edge off, mind you. You remember in The Lord of the Rings movies, when Frodo would slip the ring onto his finger and then sort of slide into this warped, wavy "not-quite-right" world of dancing shadows and muted colors? Well, it's just like that, only you're popping over into the Teletubby world instead. With Phoebe Cates. Who is naked. And serving ice cream. And the last three Star Wars movies never happened.
So that brings us to today. This morning, without really giving my body time to wake up, I went out to the driveway to switch Sophie's car seat from Molly's car to mine, anticipating a time today when Sophie and I would want to go someplace and do something other than hanging around the house all day. I got the seat out with no problem, brought it to my car and put it into the back seat, then twisted in to get the seat belt and run it through the locks... and that's when I knew I had fucked myself. If you've ever done yourself back injury before, you know it when you've done it again. There's that familiar little feeling of something just slipping itself out of whack just a tiny, tiny bit, which gives you a moment of absolute clarity in which you can only say to yourself, "Fuck." Then you have to stand up straight, because you realize that your lower back is in about two seconds going to be incapable of holding your bent-at-the-waist self upright any longer, but once you stand up you know that you're not actually going to be able to stand quite so much as lean against, which is what you do. For me, this meant leaning against the hood of the car while Molly, recognizing the sight of me trying to avoid accordioning onto the driveway, repeatedly asks me if I need any help. Which I do. Which she can't provide. Because I'm out of back pills.
So here I am today, at the beginning of what I'm going to refer to as my 6th Back Event in the past 12 years. It's a toss-up right now as to which way I'm going to fall. If I'm unlucky, in another couple of hours, I'm going to be trying to figure out how I'm going to live until I can get to the doctor tomorrow and hopefully get myself some muscle relaxants to help speed my recovery, and wondering how long I can stay out of work before they decide they don't need me at all anymore and fire my ass. If, however, my coin toss comes up heads, then I'm just going to be sore today, and I'll be hobbling around the house trying to stretch my muscles as best I can without doing more injury to myself (because as bad as it hurts to move with a messed up back, it's really the best thing you can do to try to exercise it), and tomorrow I'll be back to my usual level of mediocre health. This is my goal, because really, kidding aside, I'd much rather just not hurt than have to medicate my way out of the tunnel of ouch that I'm currently riding through.
At least now Sophie is old enough to wipe my butt for me. It's like having my own helper monkey, only with less poop-flinging. Marginally.
