Oh My Aching Back!

The year after Dad passed, was perfectly bracketed by my lower back finally crippling me.

Two days after Christmas 2014, I was out in the yard with Paul and Andy Bucko kind of on-looking as Paul had Andy clean out Dad's boat which was part of his inheritance. We were at the Cove, and my back was sore, a condition that over 53 years has been a more or less constant companion until that day!

Suddenly in a spasm of excruciating pain in my spine, I found my right leg paralyzed in an ever increasing tightening of the pain. I could barely hobble back to the house and drop onto the couch to get any relief. But there was no relief of the pain for the next 16 hours until I finally fell asleep about 5:00am. It was the weekend so I just took some Ibuprophren to ease it. On Monday I was able to reach my doctor, described the symptoms and my distance from the nearest Kaiser facility.

She prescribed a six day course of Prednesone steroid treatment to relieve the swelling and pain. But my leg by then was truly paralyzed, I could not raise my foot from the ankle, I had no feeling in the top of the foot, or the front of the leg. I could not raise the leg in a scissors motion when I was on my left side.

And I was falling down a couple times every day, like a crippled mule.

The Prednesone helped with the pain, nothing improved the paralyses or lack of sensation.

It took another ten days to get MRI scans and see the Neurosurgeon. His conclusion was I had two ruptured disks, pressing on my leg nerves, and spinal stenosis pinching off over half of my spinal canal. I was a fucked up wreck, waiting to be dumped in the junk yard.

We scheduled surgery for February 6th at Arlington Hospital Center.
I walked in, and expected that I would walk out later that day, maybe with my feeling and leg restored.

Two days later the nurse yanked out the catheter. If you were dumb enough to have any modesty about such an event, then having a strange woman pick up your limp dick and say, "this may hurt a little, but it won't last long," then with a hard yank pull out a prodigiously long tub the size of an elephant's trunk out of your little itty bitty pecker is hardly a "little hurt."

Then I had to convince them to let me out. By five pm, Miki had rescued me and I was headed for home. Still paralyzed and now with a hole in my back about 6-inches long where my spine had been worked on. A bleeding sore to pee pecker, and a bottle of pain meds which I refused to take. After all, there are worse levels of pain. I just hoped I'd get better.

Its 14 months now.
Feeling and foot are about the same.
But, I can now raise my leg in scissors style.
I have better muscle control of the leg.
I have transitioned from walker, to cane, to ankle brace to standard shoes again.
I do exercises which steadily improve my control of the leg.
I walk a good bit.
And yet yesterday, a half inch rise in a carpet at Fair Oaks Mall sent me into a tumblers' head over rolling fall. It wasn't anything, and when I was 20 I wouldn't have thought much about it, except it wasn't planned.

For a long while after the operation, my physical strength was that of a ten year old girl. The effects of anesthesia, or the surgery, whatever it was scary.
But that too has recovered. I have much of my old ability to lift and haul and work back, though my upper arms really need more exercise.

I am still a spavined old fart.
But, I am optimistic.
After all, many others younger than I during this year and some month, including the performer formerly known as Prince, found they can't say this.

I am still alive!

Two Years Later.

It has been a time in which much has happened.

Probably most important for my life was the death of Paul's and my father on January 2, 2014. He was 98. Somehow I had thought he'd live forever, at least the rest of my life.

He had Alzheimers  the last 5 or 6 years of his life which took him away from us. He still recognized the main members of his family. But much else shutdown. I suspect it was enhanced by his progressively deteriorating hearing.

In his good years he had loved music of all types, loved going to live stage plays in New York or London. And enjoyed pithy conversations, though in these he often found himself a participant of one because the other members of the circle were not of a similar caliber intellect.

He was a popular man in his age cohort.

An inveterate crossword puzzle fan, and a constant figure-rer. From his childhood he could sit by the hour and work out math problems long hand in his cribbed hand. We would often find long columns of computations along the margins of newspapers or magazines where he had simply worked out a long question of the square root of a number or the percentage of another or the profit he'd make on an investment.

My good fortune was that he was my father first before my brother Paul came along, and the step kids from his second marriage. Because of my favored place in the family order I had the treasures of spending time with the younger man who had served in war and in peace, and who held his family above all in his world.

My bad fortune was that he was my father first before my brother, . . . Because it required of me a stricter standard of behaviour and performance which sadly I often failed to meet. For that I still apologize to his ghost each day.

But hindsight is so clear. And if you could talk to yourself back then what might you say, to that headstrong lazy fellow I was, which could make any real difference?

So Dad's ghost haunts me. But not in a bad way.