Backiotomy
Today couldn’t be nicer. It’s the end of March, which means the weather is starting to turn into something remarkable, the NCAA tournament is on, giving me a reason to just sit down and relax, and the days are becoming longer, with sunset waiting until nearly 730pm before arriving to spoil everyone’s good time. It’s a lovely time of year that I desperately crave during the dark, desolate depths of winter, but today… today I am injured. Nothing unusual or dramatic like a stab wound, but something much more common and irritating; my back is out. This phrase is uttered by adults, the world over, to describe the painful sensation of no longer being able to stand completely upright without crippling lower back pain. Most of the time, it happens when a back muscle or tendon is strained and becomes inflamed. A back injury like this is like getting called to jury duty, it’s not the end of the world but it sure is gonna mess up this week’s schedule.
In fact, your back going out might be one of the worst injuries to have occur, which can be proven simply by stating to someone that your back has ‘gone out,’ and watching their face grimace at the shear thought. I’ve always found it interesting that we refer to such an episode as one’s back ‘going out,’ as though it has left and is yet to return. “Where did your back go?” someone might inquire, with the answer being “I’m not sure, but it’s definitely not here right now.” My back is absent, is maybe a better phrasing, creating the image of a derelict lower spinal region, too preoccupied with other facets of life to be present for work today. The first time my back ‘went out,’ I thought that my spine had twisted or a vertebrae was out of place when in reality, my lower-back and upper-ass muscles were performing a rear-naked choke on my hips and lower spine. Perhaps when one’s back ‘goes out,’ we’re referring to it’s level of consciousness after being suffocated by the strength of its own muscles?
As an aging tradesperson, I take great care to mitigate back injuries like this because, as one would only assume, someone who can’t stand up straight is probably going to make for a pretty crumby electrician. No one wants a twisted, gollum character crawling around their nicely furnished home, discussing lighting design. I’m so conscious of this fact that most of my daily routines involving diet and exercise are focused around my physical longevity. I use the sauna multiple times a week to reduce overall inflammation in my body and stretch and exercise frequently. I’m not bragging or anything, just making the point that, even when you’re doing the work, an injury can still occur. This is the cold, hard reality of aging and for an aging tradesperson, it begs the question: ‘what am I going to do if and when I can no longer do this type of work anymore?’ Anyone who relies on their body to make a living knows that this reality will need to be confronted sooner or later. And we all rely on our bodies to make a living, not just people working a physically demanding job. If you cannot stand up straight, it’s hard to do just about anything.
Im also a bit concerned about the visceral reaction I have every time I come across a very old tradesperson, in the field. I’m not talking about someone in their 60’s. I mean the guy that’s so old that you almost feel responsible for stopping him and asking, “Are you sure you should be doing this, man?” On the one hand, hat’s off to this fella for even getting out of bed and making it to the supply house without intentionally steering his work vehicle into oncoming highway traffic. I’d hate to image a reality where I’m in this guy’s work boots, but at the same time, if it did come to that, I’d like to believe that I’d carry with me his same resolve for the situation. On the other hand, I just can’t see myself doing this kind of work at that age. There are some jobs that, after a certain age, just seem silly to continue to attempt. No one wants to be saved by an 85-year-old fire fighter, attempting to carry them down a ladder, the same way that that no one wants to watch their electrician struggle to take 5 hours to replace one ceiling fan. Could you imagine if professional athletes faced this same conundrum? Coach sends in a 75-year-old wide receiver half-way through the first half of a football game, only to watch his body torn in two on the next bootleg pass. Some jobs just require an earlier retirement age than others.
My dad struggled with back pain for most of his life. I can remember him, lying on his stomach, face down in our filthy 70’s era shag carpeting, complaining of lower back pain. He would often ask me to ‘pop his back’ while lying there, which would require that I climb onto his back, place both palms on either side of his spine, just below his shoulder blades, and thrust vigorously until his back made the same type of cracking sound that your knuckles might make when being twisted and smashed. Seeing that I was maybe 11 years old at the time and had never taken a class on human anatomy, let alone spinal contortion, this was a risky ask on the part of my dad. It just goes to show how far someone will go, at times, to rid themselves of discomfort when their resources are limited. In my dad’s mind, he couldn’t afford to see a chiropractor regularly and was in no way getting a membership to a gym in order to lessen his back pain, by way of healthy living. So his wager was, instead, to risk a spinal injury by allowing his 11-year-old son to further his back-alley chiropractic practice. Even though I had no idea what I was doing, his back would always make the same popping sound and he would show signs of relief, so the practice continued until I was old enough to actually hurt him.
I’ve spent time visiting a chiropractor over the past few years and it’s hard to know what to think about the experience. Outside of stretching my muscles and joints, I’m not completely sure what they’re doing when I’m being adjusted. While the popping of joints gives me a feeling of relief, It doesn’t always feel safe, but I do know that I always feel better and stand up straighter every time I leave, which has kept me going back. I’ve also spent time inside of infrared sauna beds when my back decides to call it quits for a while. The intense heat directed at my back has definitely proven helpful for loosening up mucles that have decided to protest the act of standing. I think the truth is, we need lots of help when it comes to keeping ourselves upright and mobile throughout life. From massage to yoga, remaining upright on a regular basis can sometimes feel like a full-time job who’s only real-world benefit is, you get to keep going to your actual job.
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So why do backs ‘go out’ and what does that even mean, in regards to what’s happening inside of your body? From what I understand, and I am in no way a doctor, so do your own research because, if you can’t tell from the rest of the essays I’ve posted here, I’m kind of an idiot, so… fair warning, but from what I understand, your muscles will lock down to protect sensitive parts of your body, like your spine, and once those muscles lock down, it takes a lot of coercion to get them to loosen up again. You can do all of the right things, exercise, yoga, sauna, etc. and chances are, it’s still going to happen. And it never happens when we think it’s going to. It’s never when we’re trying to carry all of the groceries into the house at once in order to avoid a second trip and to prove a point to our partner, that one trip was, indeed possible. Its always when you sneeze a week later while standing inside the enema aisle of a CVS, causing you to lose control of your body’s ability to remain erect. You come crashing down, along with your dignity and a few boxes of butthole medicine, right there in aisle 7. Lucky for you, this experience was all recorded on multiple CVS cameras and you’ll be YouTube famous in no time.
I’m surprised doctors haven’t found an overall cure for back pain yet. It’s such a ubiquitous ailment which cripples millions of people daily; you’d think they’d have a bunch of teams working on a solution ‘round-the-clock. We’ve got injectibles to help with obesity and cholesterol issues but nothing that addresses the biggest design flaw in the human anatomy. Your lower back is kind of like the achilles tendon of your entire body. You can be capable of bench-pressing 500lbs or running a sub-five-minute mile but as soon as your back goes out, so do you. I wonder if there was ever a greek god of back pain during the early drafts of the ancient greek myths? But I am yet to hear any ancient wisdom from the writings of Crookedus or Scoliosis, which is a shame, because I’ve watched every podcast episode on the matter and would love to hear a fresh perspective, albeit ancient. The best we can do in the modern world is reduce inflammation with lifestyle choices, while strengthening and stretching.
There are some plus sides to your back going out but they’re mostly sad and leave you appreciating your pain-free existence. For example, when your back goes out, you do get a brief vacation from work, because you are immediately useless to everyone around you. Nothing turns a helpful, contributing member of society into a pointless nuisance like a lower back injury. The only thing you can do is rest your back muscles in the hopes that you’re back on your feet quickly and once again contributing to the insane, never-resting machine we’ve created called society. How sad is that? One of the perks of being injured is that you get to rest? This is the world we’ve created for ourselves by believing the hype that our personal worth is tethered to our daily societal production. Over the past few days, while rendered immobile due to this back injury, I watched my wife engage in a litany of tasks simultaneously, all in order to keep the damn train on the tracks, and felt terribly useless by comparison. Modern life is a series of one task after another and the only respite we find are in short windows of time while sitting on a train on our way to work, or staring at the black mirror in our palms while we take an elongated bathroom break. I’m all for being productive and, in fact, find it hard to slow down and relax at times, so I sometimes enjoy the hustle and bustle of modern life, but if we can’t rest when we need to without feeling like a major burden, perhaps we, as a society, need to take a long, hard look at our priorities under capitalism and make a few tweeks.
Here in America, we‘re left to understand, on our own, how to manage our aging bodies as we continue to work toward some type of retirement, if that’s even an option. Meanwhile, health insurance companies use the money we pay them to hire statisticians to ensure that our exact retirement ages coincide with our deaths, and they are very good at it. My dad was half a year away from being old enough to collect full social security benefits when he passed away. This is the health insurance industry’s version of a last second buzzer-beater to win the game. I’ll be fifty in a few years and as I see what awaits me on the horizon, I’m definitely concerned. Could I even do this type of work into my fifties and early sixties? I watched my dad do physical work until the day he died at the age of sixty-five, and it was such an eye-opener. But, just like him, I’m left to determine the best way forward for myself and my family. Living in a society that doesn’t prioritize the collective care for the sick and injured produces a serious set of challenges that we will all need to overcome. The real trick to solving all of this is simply to be born into a wealthy family, but for the rest of us poor unfortunate souls, a surreal Russian roulette of elderly outcomes and financial pitfalls awaits.
The truth is, I don’t have an answer to our societal issues and neither do you. It’s just too complicated and it seems that American politics exists solely to enrich those who wish to remain in power, and has little interest in properly caring for its poorest and oldest constituents. The propaganda machine that is the US has even convinced large swaths of our population that using our collective wealth to care for one another as a society is a foolish endeavor and should be ridiculed, lest we become some communist hellhole. But I think that underneath all of the fear that politicians use to control us, is a deeper, more self-serving fear; the fear of what is going to happen to us individually as we get old and sick. We all have, or have had, grandparents who loved us and cared for us when we were young and I think it’s probably important that we view all of the elders of our society as grandparents. They may not be OUR grandparents but they are OUR elders, societally speaking, and we need to prioritize how we care for them. How can we be so blind as to not see that we will face this same fate one day? Can you not see that you, too, will be an old person, god willing, and that, when that time comes for you, you too will wish to be cared for? Are we that lost that we can’t see a few steps ahead and take the necessary precautions?
Maybe it’s just my aggravated lower back muscles talking but I think that we need to take some time to consider this. If what we prioritize most is individual wealth and fame, as a society, we’re damning future generations to a world that lacks depth and basic humanity. Is that the example we want to set? Don’t we want to teach our children to care for the people and the world around them? A society based on achievement and prosperity is a great thing and it definitely has it’s place within the structure of the world we should create for ourselves, but I think those values must be paired with compassion and basic consideration for the other humans that we share this world with. We do not have to be sharks. We do not have to value money over kindness. We can make different choices that lead to a world where people’s backs can go out and they aren’t freaking out about how they’re going to pay this month’s rent. It seems so simple as I age but, sadly, the world doesn’t seem to see it that way. It’s still dog-eat-dog out there and everyone seems convinced that eating dogs is the only way to succeed. The problem with that type of society is that it never factors in the reality that is lower back pain or any other physical ailment that instantaneously changes your life.
I think, in some ways, American society is currently suffering from lower back pain. If you haven’t noticed lately, we can barely stand up straight as a country and its getting harder to do just about everything. Perhaps the risky choices we’ve made as a society, in regards to who’s pulling the strings of American politics stem from a frantic desire to ease our collective discomfort in the absence of helpful resources. Much like my dad allowing an 11-year-old to perform spinal realignment on this ailing back, we are willing to allow just about anyone to take a crack at relieving society’s tensions, regardless of the inherent risks. Maybe what we need is a the type of “time off” that comes with a back injury, in order to take a step back and realign our priorities with what we really need as citizens of this world. Basic care when we need it should not be a radical idea, and if you’ve been convinced otherwise, I suggest you take the time to imagine yourself, helpless on the floor while your wife cleans the shit out of your house in front of you. Helplessness is not dignified and we, as people, need one another in order to maintain our dignity as we age. Let’s find a way to pick one another up off the floor, help straighten each other’s spines and move forward with dignity.
The trick with recovering from you back ‘going out’ is convincing your lower back, hip and glute muscles to chill out and just let go. This is easier said than done, and reminds me of how challenging it is to persuade other parts of ourselves to ‘just let go.’ When was the last time you attempted to change a habit? It’s not easy. For the longest time, it feels pointless and nearly impossible but then, all of a sudden, something changes and what once felt impossible seems second-nature again. In the case of your lower back, the muscles need to trust, once again, that there is no threat to the spine before they begin to loosen their grasp, but when that happens, the pain and tightness are alleviated and the inflammation begins to dissipate. Perhaps, like most experiences in life, a lesson is to be gleaned from the experience of lower back pain. Maybe it’s here to teach us to take good care of ourselves, and to avoid future injury by converting bad habits into good ones? Maybe our backs go out to remind us that sometimes, it’s ok to just sit down and not be productive. The lesson could be a mutual understanding of the shared human experience and a deepening of our collective compassion for one another. I don’t know, maybe I’m just getting old.
