Pain

Backaches are weird things.  The very first time I had back pain, I was 32 years old and going to school at Berkeley.  We were taking a studio course every Friday in which we were designing and building a rammed-earth structure up at the Farralones Institute with Sim van der Ryn... it was hard physical work, clearing the site and building plywood forms and running the cement mixer.  But I left every time feeling pretty good.

One Friday, a group of us were driving home together.  We'd come across the Carquinez Bridge on Interstate 80 and were traveling south through Crockett and Rodeo, next to the Chevron refinery at Richmond.  It was dusk, and I turned in the back seat to get a view of the natural gas flares... and felt like someone had stabbed me right in the center of the back.  I couldn't expand my chest to breathe; I couldn't shift forward or backward.  People talk about a breathtaking experience—that was a literal one.

That's happened to me a few times since, maybe every three years or so.  And almost always in my mid to upper back.  I once had a chiropractor looking with me at my spinal x-ray, and while the lower half of my back was textbook-perfect curvature, the upper half was rolled forward about 10 degrees from where it should have been.  Since I learned that, I've made sure to have my computer monitor elevated so that my head is up while I'm working.  But the laptop doesn't work that way...

Anyway, I came up to Vermont on Friday evening, and spent much of Saturday writing on the laptop.  At one point, I carried all the wine left over from the wedding down a set of non-code-compliant, narrow, and uneven stairs to the basement.  I got up at 4:00 to cook dinner so we could go to Lois and Paul's at 6:00.  And by the time we got there and sat at their patio table, I knew I was in trouble.  No sudden pop like sometimes happens.  Not connected to any particular twisting or lifting.  But I could NOT find a sitting position that felt right.

And this pain was down in the small of my back, in the classic "oh my aching back" location.  That's only happened once before.  It got worse as the evening went on; I was able to be my sparking conversational self, but every time I moved a little, I got a reminder that things were not right.  When we left at about 10 o'clock, the process of getting into and out of my low car was pretty darn difficult.  Lifting my right foot to get it out of the footwell and over the door threshold... ow. Or, rather, OW!

I took a Motrin and went to bed.  Sunday morning... getting out of bed was pretty remarkable.  We can all turn in bed from our back to our side without any conscious thought at all.  But on Sunday morning, I was trying to think of the sequence of muscles I would normally use to roll over, and whether there were some alternatives that use only arms and legs and no torso.  Finally I got up; putting on socks and shoes was the hardest.

So many things we do without thinking.  Reaching over at a 45 degree angle to pick up a book from the table.  Picking up a piece of dropped cauliflower from the floor.  Pulling a chair in to the table after sitting.  All of those and many more were simply not possible.

But after a day of hot pads and high doses of Motrin, I slept pretty well Sunday night.  I left for Boston a day later than I'd planned, and got out of the car and stretched out on a regular basis. I went to the office on Monday afternoon and worked second shift, and then through the day today.  Pain-free.

Would that all of the troubles of our lives responded to Motrin and hot pads...