Back pain has been a part of my life for almost twenty years now. It started off as just "achy" and then turned full steam ahead into wicked and incapacitating pain with no warning. I remember sitting on the living room floor with my legs in a jackknife position, one stretched out, the other bent with the sole of my right foot on my inner left thigh, happily wrapping Christmas gifts for a couple of hours. My back felt sore, a couple of hours later it really hurt, and by dinner time I could not stand up straight. Ugh. I struggled to get to the doctor in the following days, prescribed strong pain killers and muscle relaxers to help with the abominable muscle spasms and sciatica that made me nauseous and kept me hunkered over the trash can in my office (just in case). Oh, and I worked (in a non-clinical role) for spine surgeons and pain management physicians. I got a lot of good advice about body mechanics and modifying how I moved, proper lifting, got stretched and massaged in exam rooms when free if patients, and eventually recovered. This kind of nightmare occurred with varying degrees of severity about every five years. Most recently, the pain was more than I could tolerate. I also began experiencing additional new and unnerving symptoms - my right leg felt as if it were wrapped with a heavy lead blanket, my right knee went "flamingo" on me, and I took two terrible falls in one week that left me black and blue on my legs and concerned that I had broken my foot (I had "only" hyper-extended all of my toes under my foot) which put me on crutches for a couple of weeks. One fall from a stool resulted in a vertebral fracture. Good grief.
I saw an orthopedist that specialized in knees. The films suggested that the knee that gave out was NOT the worse of my two osteoarthritic knees, and he suspected that the weakness might be related to my ongoing and worsening spine condition. My lowest spinal disc appeared on film like a thin black line. The vertebrae above it was slipping out of line and nerves were being pinched to the point of causing all of those symptoms of neurologic claudication in my right leg, now including neuropathy - a constant pain on the surface of my skin that feels like someone taking sandpaper to a sunburn, and that "buzzing" feeling like my feet are falling asleep and hurt. After meeting with a spine surgeon and, thankfully, having a lot of work-related knowledge of the procedure and risks, I opted to go ahead with a two-level spine fusion to relieve pressure on nerves, reduce the risk of permanent damage, and stabilize my spine.
Recovery has been much harder than I ever expected. I spent nearly a decade with daily interaction with spine surgery patients. I saw some have a much harder time than others (usually much older patients who also lived alone), and I saw a lot who did really well faster than I would have expected. I have always been healthy in the sense that I recovered very quickly from "cooties" like a cold, and recovered well from my only other surgery 20 years ago. This one has kicked my butt.
When I came home from the hospital, I could barely walk even using my walker. I had a vertical incision on both my abdomen and back larger than the average cesarean incision (I asked friends who had gone that route). My husband rented the first medical bed he could find. It felt like an awful sleeper sofa, but it was what we had available. There were nights I just sobbed, miserable and unable to roll one direction or the other on my own to get more comfortable, and NOTHING was comfortable. I felt gross, unable to shower until more than a week after surgery when someone finally put a waterproof bandage over my back incision. My hair was greasy, my pain was worse than anything I had ever experienced and meds weren't helping much, I was stuck in a dreary office downstairs...life just sucked. And it sucked like this for a couple of weeks before I started to feel like I was improving.
It has been nine weeks since my surgery. I have made good progress recovering, but it has been slow. I was telling a friend that this has been like a hard diet. You starve yourself and give up everything you love to eat and drink. The struggle is on the mind all of the time. Weight loss is in very small increments and you don't see it looking at yourself in the mirror every day, but someone who hasn't seen you for a while notices right away. Or you find that suddenly your jeans are loose right out of the dryer. This recovery has been that kind of agonizingly slow. Then one day I realized I got up from a particular chair by myself. Then I feel the setback of still not being able to get up from a toilet without a walker or cane (yeah, that one's real fun). Then I waddle around the kitchen without falling, making scrambled eggs and ham by myself, or a cup of tea. Woohoo!
There isn't much to distract me while I recover. Home PT has run its course, so says my insurance company. I am too unstable to walk alone outdoors since we have windy roads with no sidewalks and there is no one to pick me up if I take a splat. My husband has been working at home since March 2019, so Zoom meetings are going about ten hours a day. He doesn't complain, but I know it has been exhausting - taking care of me, taking care of a huge house, working - all of which adds up to more hours in a week than exist. I feel guilty and useless, as if all I do is watch TV and do my PT throughout the day. Brain cells are falling out in chunks. I read at night to help me doze off. If I read during the day, it makes me doze off too and nighttime sleep is too hard to come by, so no napping! I have GOT to get in a better state of mind.
My goal this week is to find something creative to do that doesn't strain my back and that is not coloring! I keep hoping that I can find a way to cut quilt bits, or even play with watercolor, anything to save my sanity.
Time for more PT. I need to move more, fuss less.
