So, you may have noticed I haven’t been updating the site much. I have been busy at work, but that isn’t what has been stopping me. We all know the cliche of the tortured artist, where great art comes from pain. I have had enough pain over the past few months to fuel several artists, and no great art has come of it. Unless you can count my whimpering on the floor as performance art. This back thing has just been horrible. Worse than I imagined it could be. I have never had any back pain in my life. I played basketball and volleyball through high-school, and volleyball in college. By the way, BYU still lists this personal information about me in my player profile:
… studied nuclear physics … served a mission for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Maracaibo, Venezuela … started playing volleyball because his twin brother convinced him to try out in the ninth grade.
One of those things isn’t quite true. I will let you guess which one. Back to the point I was making… I have never had any pain in my back, not even a sore muscle! Nothing! And out of the blue I have been struck down. My first theory was that my twin brother Joe has been really evil lately and this has been a case of smiting mistaken identity. But if that were going to happen, he would have been struck by lightning a long time ago. Really, I think the answer is that I have helped more people move than I can count, and my back actually finally gave out after helping lay sod all day for a Habitat for Humanity house. Don’t worry, this experience has not been lost on me. I have learned from it. I share with you my wisdom: Don’t help anyone ever! All your good will and all of your good deeds will just be distilled into the vile black essence of agony and injected straight into your spine. If I had known this was going to happen I would have gladly told the Habitat for Humanity people to live in a box, or eat cake or something. In fact, I am thinking of going back and burning the house down. Don’t judge me! If you knew how badly my back has been hurting that would seem entirely reasonable. Man, I have always wanted to yell, “Don’t judge me!” It was just as good as I hoped. I totally recommend doing it, though I would say it would be even more satisfying in person than delivered through pixels. In fact, as long as you are not judging me I can tell you that my brother just left on a business trip to India and asked me if I wanted him to bring anything back. I told him, “Find a man who is 6’6” and bring me his spine! There are a ton of people there, no one will even notice.“ Don’t judge me! So today I had a spinal block. Basically they injected some anesthetic and some cortisone right down into the nerve root. The cortisone will reduce the inflammation over the next little while and should buy me a month or so of pain relief. That is heaven. The spinal block itself is not pleasant. (That is right pregnant ladies, I have had sciatica for months and just got an epidural. No more holding that whole ”pregnancy and birth“ thing over me). You lie flat on your stomach, which, if your back is like mine, will be enough pain for one day. The doctor uses a fluoroscope (a live x-ray) to guide the placement of a needle right to the nerve root in the spine. It feels a bit like a root canal in your lower back. This was my second spinal block, so I knew what to expect and I was not very excited about it (I prefer to say ”not very excited“ instead of scared, it sounds so much better). While I lay on my stomach with my butt in the air (apparently dignity can interfere with a spinal block as much as it can with an MRI) and my face buried in a cushion with a blood pressure monitor on my arm and a heart rate monitor on my finger. I graduated in psychology (dang, I gave away the answer to the volleyball profile trivia contest!) so I knew that my nervous state, and general not-so-happy-that-my-back-hurts-twenty-four-hours-a-day state of mind was going to lower my pain threshold. I decided to try to take control of my feelings and deeply relax while my spine was stabbed. I started off by smiling. I smiled through the whole thing. I also breathed deeply and focused on relaxing. It worked. The pain was totally minimal, and afterwards the nurse monitoring my vitals said, “That was crazy. Normally people’s heart rate and blood pressure rise a lot during the shots, yours actually dropped.” If I could have stood (my leg was entirely numb) I would have jumped up and said, “What’s up now spinal block? I OWN YOU!” Hey, I am not having a whole lot of victories here lately. I’ll take them where I can get them.