One more trip around the sun

Today is an anniversary of sorts. It’s the day I decided that my back injury was serious enough to take me out of work. I’d actually sprained my lumbar spine the month before, picking up my just-repaired G4 and hauling it up the stairs, but stubborn as I was, I thought I could have a few visits to the chiropractor and continue to work through it. I’d done it before. A couple of frozen shoulders, a sore tailbone – just got a few snaps and kept on going.

And I was actually starting to feel better. But a month later, I drove my husband’s Jeep (my car wouldn’t start) to meet my father and nephews for dinner at a Mexican restaurant. It’s odd how crystalline every moment of that Wednesday night has become in my mind – the dishes we ordered, the jokes my nephews told, and as we were parting ways in the parking lot, hunting for the car key in my purse. I was having a little trouble with the key. Finding it, for one, because not only was it different from my own, but husband had just had a new key made and I told my father that earlier in the day I’d had problems finagling it in just right.

But I did it, and waved toward my father’s headlights, to signal that I got the key in the ignition and I was OK to drive home. The road was bumpy – the back roads here are continually under construction, it seems.

When I pulled into the garage, opened the driver’s door and put my right foot down, a rocket of pain shot from my lower back down into my foot. I might never know exactly what did it. Hitting all the potholes, the position of my leg reaching too far for the pedals, or just timing. 60% of people, I’ve heard, walk around with herniated disks and never feel any pain. Two of mine had just woken up and said “hello.”

I took the rest of the week off but the pain didn’t improve. Monday morning, good little work addict that I was, I was dressed and ready to go in. But my car battery had died again. I should have taken that as a sign, but no, I asked husband to drive me in. I lasted the morning, tanked up on Advil. The second day I drove myself. It was only a seventeen-minute commute, but I had to stop mid-way to rest, as the pain was intense enough to bring tears to my eyes. This is never a sign of anything good. But still, I tried. I had a deadline, a boss who was in Germany intervening in a press run that was going badly, and she needed me there to navigate files back and forth via FTP and e-mail. The third day, a snowy morning, I only stayed at work long enough to arrange for an x-ray, show my boss’s assistant where everything important was, and then I drove home, defeated.

It’s not exactly where everything started, but it’s where the camel of my life had taken the last straw and, in slow-motion, his legs splayed out from under him like twigs on ice.

It was the start of endless paperwork that made me sick, of endless prescriptions that made me sicker. Endless co-payments. And endless ice-packs, the only thing that brought me consistent relief.

And this was only the beginning of a seemingly endless spiral of defeats, discouragement and depression.

But it also brought some brilliance into my life. It brought me the realization that my stressful job was slowly killing me. It brought me closer to my husband and my family. It brought me a talented neurosurgeon. Who advocated like a bulldog to get me immediately onto the schedule of one of the best physical therapists and human beings I’ve ever met. To paraphrase an acquaintance’s poem, “the thing about spines is that they are attached to people.” Tom knows this so well. And when anything came up that he couldn’t help me with, he had a fat Rolodex and could point me in the right direction.

A year out, some things are better. The herniations have, as the doctors say, “resolved.” I can walk, drive, sit at the computer and write. The victories came slow but sure – the first time I got behind the wheel, the first time I visited a friend’s house and sat at her dining room table, the first time I went out to a restaurant, the first time I picked something up off the floor.

There are still some things I’m not ready to do yet, and I’m still learning. I will always be learning. The fibro is still a bear at times, I have my bad days. I have setbacks, when I overreach my limits and need yet another round of ice packs, yet another trip to the physical therapist. Sometimes, like now, they come in disheartening bunches. But as Tom gently reminds me, “you’ve been here before and you got out of it, and you’ll get out of this one.”

And I’ll get out of this one.

But hopefully I’m learning how to fall with grace and humor and style. To take a deep breath, evaluate the damage, dust the dirt off my ass and keep on going.