I wake up stiff. I hobble out of bed. I have to use the hand rail to get down the stairs without falling because my body only moves begrudgingly and stiltishly, in fits and starts that aren’t reliable.
On a good day, this fades within half an hour and I have very little pain. I have very little pain on these days only because I have learned, over 20 years, how to move just so. Every minutiae of movement is metered and intentional and, when it is not – because I have had little pain for enough days in a row to forget – I am instantly reminded through the return of pain.
Every day, a little piece of the broken metal from one of the rods that runs along my spine, trying to correct an extreme couple of curves, scrapes into my vertebrae every single move I make.
On a bad day, pain can be unending. Especially if it is cold and damp, radiating swells of pain ache out of my healed and sometimes rebroken spinal-processes, the little wings that come off your vertebrae. Rebreaking them is never fun. It happens seemingly randomly, because they’ve worn themselves out trying to hold all that impact absorption together. You never realize how much impact your spine takes on until it fails you. Then you notice that you impact your spine multiple times every day, even if you are very careful to minimize impact. You drive? You impact your spine every tiny bump you go over. You walk? You impact your spine every step you take. You run? I used to do that, until I broke my spinal-processes on that very special vertebrae that now screams outward and down my leg, into my hips, up my lower back on those dripping and gelid days and nights.
On a bad day, my ankles, knees and hips pretend to hurt, too, but their pain is never as bad as the arthritis from the broken spinal-processes. They are just pretending to hurt.
On a bad day, the degenerative discs in my lower and upper back, there are two of them, pinch and scrape. They sometimes grab a nerve to torture, shooting electrical spikes of pain outward and into my shoulders or down my leg. On a bad day, there are stabbing, needles of hot wire arcing down my leg or down my arm and, sometimes, when it is really bad, my toes or my fingertips tingle and there is an aching that follows the path of the nerve impulses.
On a bad day, muscles tighten to try to protect what they can’t know is already broken. They spasm and clench and, if it is very bad, three different regions of muscles are spasming at once. The muscles clench and pretend to unclench but really just clench again. They do this unendingly. The clenching is like a charlie horse but it pounds rhythmically until it is just a constant scream of pain that no one can hear.
On a bad day, my head hurts, because why not? The nerves that can cause headache and mess with my optical nerves are also being pinched. On a bad day, I have lots of digestive issues and stomach pain. The nerves that cause these problems are also being pinched.
On the worst days, I literally cannot move without excruciating pain in multiple areas of my spine and body at once. On the worst days, I have skeletal, nerve, organ, and muscle pain of various types and severity, all at once.
No one can tell. No one can see pain. Unless I scream or groan or moan, no one will know that it hurts. I almost never vocalize my hurt. I look fine, to people.
When I tell people, “I have a bad back.” They often laugh. They have laughed since I was 16. They laugh and tell me to wait until I’m older. I stare blankly back, trying not to hate them for dismissing the entirety of my world at the same time as reminding me that my future will likely be worse.
When I tell people, they ask me if I’ve tried yoga, or pain killers, or chiropractics, or massage, or surgery….it’s so well meaning and sweet and compassionate. It’s so misguided and frustrating and grating. Yes, over 20 years, I’ve tried nearly everything.
When I tell people, they tell me they know what I mean because they have pain, too.
It’s not a competition, I know. Pain is relative, I know. The first time I had a muscle spasm, just one group of muscles, no other injuries or pain yet, I screamed out loud. I cried bellowingly for hours. I took narcotics and thought there was no way I could handle that. Now, I have the exact same pain and work through it without even wincing and no one can tell.
It’s a continuum.
I was sent the message, recently, that there are three ways of dealing with pain, if you indeed are amongst the few who choose to deal with it instead of letting it become themselves, consume their beings, and destroy their worlds: a young soul does it by learning about the way things are, a mature soul does it by learning how else things might be, and an old soul does it by learning how else they might be.
I take care of myself better than I ever have and I hurt more than I ever have. I can live through it. I want to play and dance and sing and teach and learn and grow and I cannot do those things if I stop moving, so I don’t stop moving. I’m not dead, yet, so I’m taking all I can get. Some days, I hate everyone and everything, for a time. I breathe and come back to my self and try to give myself credit for fighting so hard all the time.
In reality, I’m just learning how to let go all the time. Fear is the mind killer, and pain is the world destroyer. The best medicine of all, then, is pain, because when you can build a world despite the totality of its demolition, there is nothing that can stop you.
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