Torn In Two - Part 2
The chronic pain series
It was a rather brisk Saturday morning in August of 2020. I was standing on my work bench in the bathroom of a friend of a friend’s house. For some silly reason, I’d agreed to help this guy redo his bathroom ceiling after his place had sprung a leak. That was the first lesson this two-year ordeal taught me: never agree to help someone on a Saturday.
The friend of a friend in question had left the room to answer a call, leaving me to fight with the decorative cornice that seemed hellbent on sliding down the newly tiled walls of this cramped bathroom. A few nails would’ve held the uncooperative cornice in place – nails I could’ve hit in with my hammer. But my hammer was in my tool belt. And I definitely wasn’t wearing that, was I? Of course not. Only conscientious ceiling fixers wore their tool belts while working – and I certainly wasn’t one of them. Ohh no. I was more of what you might call a ‘cowboy’. My renegade ways meant that I had to let go of the precariously hanging piece of cornice so that I could get off my bench, put on my tool belt, and get back to the cornice before it and the wet plaster that lined the back of it, fell to the floor.
It was bending down to grab my tool belt that did it. I hadn’t even reached it when:
PING! PING! POP!
The initial shock felt like when you go to take a step and there’s nothing there for your foot to land on. And the initial pain felt like when you realise you’ve stubbed your toe but the intensity of what’s about to hit you hasn’t fully registered yet. Then, my entire lower-back constricted. Instantly I knew something was wrong – I just didn’t know how bad it was. As I cautiously tried to straighten my torso, my rapidly tightening back took no time in assuring me that it was, in fact, really bad. I’d lost all range of motion. I tried to take a step towards the bench to sit down as a thousand knives plunged into my back – the pain was not about to be outdone by the constriction. As I tried, once more, to take a step, I suddenly understood how it felt to be wrapped up in the death grip of an anaconda. My back muscles were constricting so intensely that breathing became painful. With the knives twisting and the anaconda squeezing ever tighter, I said out loud; “Fuck, this is not good”, right as the decorative piece of cornice fell to the floor splattering plaster all over my calves.
What happened next is a blur. I remember the concerned look on the face of the female pharmacist as I staggered into the chemist like the hunch-back of Notre Dame. I remember the wounded yelps that escaped my mouth every time I pushed in the clutch. And I remember crawling on my hands and knees up the stairs of my apartment block.
I spent the next five days in bed, in utter agony and completely immobile. And I’m not being hyperbolic. I mean, apologies if this is too much information, but I was so incapacitated that I pissed into bottles on those first five days because staggering to the toilet seemed inconceivable. On day six my back muscles started to loosen up enough that I could grimace my way to the toilet. On day nine I started to regain some semblance of mobility and the pain began to subside. And by the two-week-mark my back had returned to normal, and I had no more pain. And since I was a doctor-avoiding-idiot, I put that incident down to some random one-off event and got back to life as normal.
That is, until it happened again a few weeks later.
The second time was worse. Somehow, the pain was more intense. If last time it was knives and an anaconda, then this time it was flaming swords and some primordial leviathan. If last time the tightness rendered me incapacitated, then this time it turned me to stone. And if last time I pissed into bottles, well, you don’t even want to know what I did this time. . . But the truly disconcerting thing about the second time: I wasn’t even bending down to pick something up. In fact, if you must know, I was standing back up after sitting on the toilet. That’s it! I hadn’t had some big fall on my skateboard. I hadn’t been trying to pick up something heavy at work. I hadn’t been tearing through some wicked move on the dance floor. I’d been getting up off the fucking toilet. I found this more concerning than if I had of had some obvious injury. I mean, I was 29, not 90. Surely, I had a few good years left in me before seemingly innocuous movements caused me to pull my back out.
You’d think the level of pain those two incidents caused coupled with the mysterious origins that triggered them would’ve been enough for me to go see a doctor, right? HA! Come on now, I was far too ‘tough’ for that. Instead, I chose to do what I always did: ignore the problem. Push through the pain. And carry on as normal as if this mounting issue didn’t exist. Ahh avoidance my old friend what ridiculous times we’ve spent together.
Considering how silly it was for me to eschew medical assistance; I feel I should begin to unpack some of the unhelpful attitudes that informed that decision. For starters, the decade prior to this back injury I’d worked fulltime as a tradesman – leaving that work behind only six months prior to go study at university. In the simplest of terms this means that for ten years I was firmly entrenched in male dominated work environments. Catcalls were yelled from scaffolds, ‘good-natured’ shit-stirring mirrored school-yard bullying, and the ‘pansies’ that couldn’t hack it bore the worst of the torment. Now, I’m not about to paint male-dominated environments in a completely black and white way, because there were also a lot of hard-working no-nonsense men who did not partake in any of that garbage and just got their work done. However, what I am comfortable to claim is that there was not much nuance when it came to toughing it out to get the work done. Nearly every guy I worked with during that time, especially the guys over forty, had some chronic work-related injury that they’d been battling for years. Compression bandages on elbows and knees were just as common as nudie mags in the site toilets. Painkillers and anti-inflammatories were downed on smoko with more frequency than the free cups of stale-instant-coffee. This is one of the less acknowledged parts of many male-dominated work environments: 90% of these cunts are pushing through physical pain on a daily basis. And if you spend ten years in such a culture, you start to absorb these attitudes to the point where – ignoring your back pain becomes ‘normal’.
And then, there’s skateboarding. I’m bias when it comes to skateboarding as that plank of wood has enriched my life in innumerable ways. But that doesn’t mean I can’t acknowledge it’s downsides. After all, this is an activity where failure results in collisions with concrete. To skateboard is to become accustomed to pain. It’s to fight a losing battle against gravity, asphalt, and accumulative injuries. And the skateboard culture knows this, and in some weird and disconcerting way – there are sects of the culture that even glorify it. Skateboard culture has a special place in its heart for the professionals who put themselves through untold pain to progress their field. We revere the Tony Hawks and Danny Ways of the world not just for the death-defying feats they perform, but also for their willingness to bear the physical toll that comes from performing such feats. And on one level we should celebrate these skateboarders as it is inspiring to see people give so much of themselves to the thing they love. But on another level, such celebrations can also lead impressionable young skaters (me) to gobble up all that romantic nonsense about ‘destroying yourself for your art’. And if these impressionable young skaters aren’t careful, then the destructive attitudes they’ve adopted can quickly see them ignoring their back issue – as they think such behavior is ‘normal’.
Given that I’d adopted such deleterious attitudes, it will probably come as no surprise that over the next few months I continued to ignore my back pain. So much so that I subjected myself to four or five more bouts of bed-ridden agony before I acknowledged there was a problem. And by then, there really was a problem. On top of the muscle spasms that rendered me incapacitated for a week every time I committed the sin of moving – my back had now begun to ache all the time. The ache wasn’t as intense as the spasms. Nor did it leave me completely immobile. It was, however, absolutely relentless. It kept me awake. It made it impossible to focus. And very quickly it started to drive me nuts. It wasn’t just the pain that bothered me – it was that there was no moment of reprieve. It just kept tormenting me. Incessantly. No matter what position I was in. No matter how many heat packs I applied. No matter how many anti-inflammatories I consumed. No matter what the fuck I did, I couldn’t escape the nagging pain that gnawed at my back. And so, off to the doctors I finally hobbled.
To be continued. . .
My first back injury was sliding into a lunch table. My second was reaching for a stapler. The causes were so innocuous and unimpressive that the pain and incapacitation that followed were inconceivable. The origin stories for being felled like this should be epic man vs nature tales that lead to battle scars worn like badges of honor, but they rarely are. Those tiny discs in our spines are much more fickle than that.
This storytelling here is incredible. Because I do know pain like this, I can attest that you descriptions of the symptoms do justice to what I felt. I straightened my posture instinctively while reading. Your description of the on-set in the bathroom nails that helpless feeling as this one wrong move suddenly crumples you inward and leaves you in a broken-postured rigor mortis. This piece conveys the physical experience of this miserable injury so well, at least as I experienced it—you’ve literally hit every symptom except one.
The most fascinating element was your look at the cultural connotations around it. Pain tolerance is absolutely something conditioned as necessary to earn masculinity when I was growing up;. My dad once had a four-inch piece of wood impale him while breaking down branches and he asked for a towel; he needed surgery and eight staples. Back injuries defy that endurance of pain because they inhibit function and overtake nearly all motor function at times. Everything goes through the back! Sitting uses that area, sleeping affects that area—the back and spine are grand central station for corporeal kinetics. And yet caving to that injury feels so manly. I made mine worse the first time by doing this at baseball practice that needed to get done. I couldn’t just stand there hunched over! I’d have been a wuss!
I don’t enjoy, per se, reading about your pain; it’s uncomfortable to follow a good person felled by his failing form. But it’s compelling writing, sharp storytelling, and a visceral experience for me approaching five years post-surgery. I’m eager to see how you ultimately addressed this conflict physically, culturally, and emotionally.
Ahhhh, what a great chapter and insight into our culture’s refusal to acknowledge pain and allow it to slow us down or pay attention. My husband just started working with a new client the other day who reported that there are 1000s of deaths and 100’s of thousands of injuries on construction sites per year. That’s a whole lot of people popping pain-killers and pushing through injuries until the body finally says No More.