Oh My Aching Back!

All my best pain comes out of nowhere. Take my back (please).

One April morning in the late Eighties, I was living in Boston and looking forward to visiting my roommate's family for Easter dinner. I had never had a moment of back pain in my life, but on this particular morning I woke up and couldn't move. There had been no injury, no twisting or lifting the day before, it came straight out of nowhere and knocked me flat. The pain quickly subsided that day, and ever since then I have lived with the possibility that it could come back for no good reason. Like it did last week.

Then on Saturday, the mysterious back pain decided to top itself. I spent the entire day howling, basically, and even when I did find a position that was comfortable (no, not comfortable--not painful is the best that can be said), even then I would occasionally suffer muscle spasms that would make me howl anyway.

All my life I have avoided taking any sorts of pills unless ordered to by a doctor, or forced by urgent necessity. For years I never even kept over-the-counter painkillers in the apartment, and when a headache came I would always try to just ride it out. Lie down with the lights out, try to fall asleep, and hope it would be gone when I awoke. Sometimes it was, sometimes it wasn't, and then I would find an Advil somewhere. (This got harder to do as time passed, whether because my tolerance diminished or the headaches strengthened, who knows. Now I keep a bottle of Advil at home, and one at work.)

This practice is so ingrained that it took a full day of this howling before the thought even occurred: Hey, I can take an Advil! The thought woke me up Sunday morning, after a fitful night of "sleep" that mostly consisted of trying and failing to find a position that worked. I took the Advil, I put an ice pack on my back, and over the course of the morning the pain subsided at last. I've been taking Advil every six hours ever since, and the pain is manageable and I'm doing the things that I do.

I'm sure that one of those amazing doctors you see on TV could dig through layers of symptoms and find that in fact these pains don't come out of nowhere; but in practice, I find that doctors aren't usually looking to be Dr. House. On the one hand, symptoms are almost always what they appear to be on the surface, and ninety-nine times out of a hundred, "Take two aspirin and call me in the morning" really does get the problem fixed. On the other hand, the doctor has a full day of appointments and you have to keep these things moving along. So whatever arcane thing is causing my back to hurt, sometimes a little sometimes a lot, irregularly and unpredictably, will probably never be explained. And me, I'll just have to remember to keep a bottle of something at hand, always.

Here's to hoping this particular episode decides to end itself soon.