Backing into Old Age

My fellow Americans…

As we gather here today in the cozy confines of the interwebs, it is my duty to inform you that the state of my lower back is SHIT. If my back was a test paper, I’d return it to the student with a huge red “F” scrawled across the middle of it in pig’s blood.

A battery of X-rays and MRIs have revealed a grab-bag of wrong shit going on down there, at the skeletal level. We’re talking bone spurs, a corkscrew twist in my spine just over my ass, arthritis, osteodegeneration, other big words I’ve already forgotten – if it was a cocktail, it would be a kamikaze.

(I tried to get a copy of the X-Ray to post here for your gasping-in-horror pleasure, but apparently I am not allowed access to pictures of myself outside the specialist’s office. It wasn’t a gynecological exam for Christ’s sake, just a black & white snapshot of my roller-coaster lower spine. If its status changes, I’ll swap my close-up, above, for it.)

I’d been advised by multiple sources that after I saw the spinal specialist the other week, he’d likely refer me out to somebody with a big needle full of temporary relief. Which relief came with some nasty side effects, but I figured I’d dole it out to myself parsimoniously – only go get a shot when I had to travel. I’ve been dancing with addiction since I was a teenager, I’ve gotten pretty good at staying a step ahead of it.

Alas and alack, even that sword of Damocles was denied me. As my symptoms are limited to sudden, incapacitating spasms of pain, not the steady, relentless 24/7 kind of pain, I do not qualify for The Big Shot.

Instead, I receive a prescription for copious amounts of physical therapy, a referral to a pain management specialist and the promise of inevitable back surgery down the road. The assistant specialist told us off-the-record that spinal surgeries tend to lead to more spinal surgeries, he referred to it as the surgical equivalent of The Domino Effect. Thus, they exhaust every other option first in an effort to put off that initial spinal surgery as long as possible.

It’s a shitty prognosis, especially considering I’m still relatively young (47), and the rest of my life in pain (and/or physical therapy, which is the same thing to me) looks at this point like it could be a long time.

So I come home and make the following report to The Last Boy Scout, my official external conscience (talk about shitty part-time gigs!), after he expresses concern that I don’t use this as an excuse to let the addictive side of my personality run amuck with the whole ‘pain management’ thing.

I write:

No. dude, they were trying to throw muscle relaxers at me – both of them today, like the main doctor and his similarly-clad flunky (obviously a mentor/mentee relationship). My doctor looks like an Arab John Lovitz. It’s all I could do to keep from making jokes about it at first, but the outlook became so progressively dispiriting, eventually I didn’t feel inclined anymore.

Anyhow, my problem isn’t with pain. Pain is pain. We all get old and more shit hurts, more work is required to sustain a comfortably ambulatory lifestyle. Nor is my problem with drugs. I like the two I’m already on and am EAGER not to add anything potentially volatile to what is currently an ideal pharmacological cocktail.

My specific problem is with out-of-the-blue, crippling spasms for which they got no drugs anyhow (it’s the whole “out of the blue” part – you don’t know you’re going to have one till you’re sucking carpet). I had one while The Missus was out of town last weekend. Thank Jeebuz it happened in the middle of the night and The Boy wasn’t around to see Daddy go all noodley. It went like this: Fell asleep as soon as I put The Boy down earlier in the evening, wiped out and overslept my usual 2-ish hour limit by a considerable amount. Woke up stiff and sore, rolled gingerly out of bed and walked into the front room. Saw one of The Boy’s book’s lying in the middle of the floor and didn’t want to slip on it in the darkness. Bent down to pick it up and BLOWIE! The next thing I knew I was gasping for breath and eating a faceful of couch, my feet and knees still on the floor. My back wasn’t about to straighten up and it was willing to take down the entire organism to make sure it couldn’t be forced to work as designed.

It was trippy. I don’t remember how I made it to the couch, but my knees were unskinned so I must have pivoted as I realized I was passing out and thrown myself at the sofa! What I wouldn’t give to see third-party footage of that. But it’s what I do when I can feel sudden unconsciousness coming on, I throw myself toward furniture. Usually chairs, but I couldn’t stand up this time. Even passing out, my brain made a calculated (or lucky) choice and saved my ass. I was able to crawl up on the couch and into a sitting position and bla bla bla, the event passed.

So I was really hoping for a Magic Bullet Shot this morning, even if it had side-effects. I thought I’d only get them only once in a while, not regularly. Whenever I had to pass for normal outside my indigenous environment. When there’s a multi-day family event to pass as normal at, where I didn’t wanna be the spoiled-before-his-sell-date old man sitting in the rocker on the porch, telling stories nobody’s listening to about when he used to have teeth. Hearing whispers of “Gee, Fang’s really gone downhill since his back bla bla bla” while much older in-laws than me go out and scale K2 for laughs.

It’s just depressing, but I’m definitely going the NSAIDS/gut-it-out route, not Goofball Alley from where no good ever returns.

Okay, report is over. I’m back talking to you now:

My first challenge occurs later this month during the annual ‘weekend in Yosemite with the in-laws and their entire extended family’ – always a low-pressure gig for a people-person like me to begin with. The trick will be finding a sleeping situation that a) allows me to sleep without provoking the spasms that knock me on my ass and B) doing it discreetly enough that my encroaching infirmity isn’t the talk of the town after we leave.

Don’t expect to see a lot more reports about this sort of thing. I’m only mentioning it now so, years later when I get to wondering when it all started to go downhill for me physically, I can scroll back to this post and go, “Oh yeah, that was it!”