I'm feeling like a walking cliche this morning. It hasn't been that many years since I mocked my elders for seemingly having nothing to talk about but their health -- the various operations, the specialists they were seeing, the battery of medications they took -- and now it's payback time. I've become one of them. The pill bottles are proliferating, and conversations with friends focus way too much health issues.
The latest for me is my back. It's betrayed me. I would have halfway understood having back trouble if I did anything that was remotely strenuous. Screwing up my back while I was still working for the Park Service and scrambling in and out of boats, bushwhacking trying to find abandoned buildings, or doing something -- anything! -- that required some effort wouldn't bother me much. Ditto if I'd managed to screw it up at home, even if it was by reaching for something on a closet shelf. No such luck.
What's done my back in is several decades of office work. Eight hours a day in front of a computer while sitting in chairs that don't fit right coupled with a lifetime of poor posture. End result: pinched nerve and strange pains. No, that's not quite right: End result -- multiple visits to a physical therapist in an attempt to unlearn a lifetime of bad habits and learn some "trunk strengthening" exercises.
I definitely should have listened to my mother when she kept nagging me to sit up straight.
wow, i could have written this word for word myself.
ReplyDeleteabout a year and a half ago, i woke up in the middle of the night with really bad back pain. it kept happening every night, and wasnt calming down.
After getting xrays and seeing doctors and stuff, they determined that it was a bad muscle pull.
ive ben to physical therapists out the yin yang, and almost 2 years later i still have the pain.
the only thing that helps is to sleep with a pillow under my legs. try that....