To '03 & '04, the Years I Spent With Back Pain

I don’t remember you clearly and I did not love you at the time, and this is not the kind of love I hope others get to share. Like mean lovers I finally broke up with but spent years healing from, I realize now, there’s value in the experience.

The doctors would ask me, “Can you live with this?” I know now they did not mean it as literally as I heard it. I could hardly walk. In the mornings, my three-year old son would want to crawl up on the couch next to me to read a book, and his touch would sear me. I took him to a movie, and we spent most of the time in the bathroom while I threw up because of the pain. I thought, when they said, “live”, they meant, “Is this going to kill you?” My heart was still beating; I was still breathing. I guess it’s not going to kill me. Probably not.

I learned that doctors speak in metaphors. “Live with” means “tolerate” or “bear.” No, I cannot bear it.

Doctors see what they are trained to see and treat the way they are trained to treat with the tools they are trained to use. The internist said back pain is hard to define, origin often unknown. Take Tramadol. Neurologist orders the MRI. The disc has completely slipped out of the spine and is crushing the nerve. He treats the nerve, orders spinal injection that makes the pain worse. Physical therapists say it’s how I move and so I practice moving every day. The yoga healer wants to lengthen. He wants me to stretch myself out of pain. He is dying of cancer and coughs his way through my treatment. I don’t blame him for wanting everything to be longer.

Herniated disk L5

The surgeon says, “If you hadn’t been so macho and waited two years to see me, I would have said you have 100% chance of recovery. Now it’s 80%. I do this every day.”

I learned that medicine is an art with some science added, the opposite of physics: science with some art added. I was the canvas and they painted me in the style of their genre: impressionism, abstraction, realism. Thank God I did not find the deconstructionist.

Healing is slow, thin layers of trust, of faith, smooth over day after day so that finally, one day, two years after surgery, there is no more pain. None. The whole day. From “healing” to “healed.” Rarely do we ever make that move.