Lumbar Stupidity

Lumbar Stupidity

Hi Gang. Thought I'd check in with another quick blog on how the world is treating me. I'll get into the particulars in a minute, but first how about a movie reference? See if you can remember. This film was released in 1994 and was the top-grossing movie in North America that year. It won scads of Academy Awards including best picture, best director, best actor and more. Yep, I'm talking “Forrest Gump”. And at a certain point in this much-beloved movie, Forrest mouthed the immortal words, “Stupid is as stupid does!” Remember that? I never actually figured out exactly what he meant by those words. Perhaps it pertained to his simple-mindedness. Perhaps it had a deeper meaning that eluded me when I saw the movie. In any event the line seemed apropos when he said it and I guess that was the important part. But thinking about that movie, which I was recently, and thinking about that line has got me also thinking about stupidity in general.

And something stupid in particular that I did recently.

You may recall my talking about stupidity in a couple of my previous blogs. My own stupidity in particular and how those particular acts of stupidity had always led to consequences – always – and mostly bad consequences. But I'd like to differentiate tonight between what I see as two different kinds of stupidity if you don't mind following my train of thought.

The first kind of stupidity I'd like to call “being stupid kinda on purpose”. This is where a situation arises where you need to do something that might result in an undesirable consequence, but you say to yourself, I can get away with it just this once. You're an active participant in your upcoming act of stupidity and it's eventual “bad result”. You realize, in your heart of hearts, you're doing something stupid, but the censor circuit has been disabled in your brain and you go ahead and do the deed anyhow.

The second kind is what could be called “stealth stupidity”. It refers to an act of stupidity that you don't even realize you're doing. After the fact, in retrospect, you can see the parts all aligning to the eventual uh-oh moment, and you can then identify the stupid thing you did, but going in it's pretty much invisible.

I guess I was stupid in the second way sometime Saturday. I say sometime because the actual stupid act could have been any one of several different possibilities.

Here's the story.

I have a bad back. It's a problem that lots of folks born around the time I was are presently experiencing. Things down in the lower back neighborhood start wearing out and start allowing other things to grind together that aren't supposed to. That wearing out/grinding/nerve punishing action results in pain. Sometime the pain is slight and more of an inconvenience. Other times it's a fully-charged car battery zapping a thunderbolt into your lumbar area and sparking bright crackles of agony along all the nerves in the area.

I've had this situation going on in my lower back for some years now. Most of the time it's the old low-level stuff, kind of a background noise – like the speaker hiss of an old LP playing one of your favorite songs. If you concentrate a bit you realize that your lower back sorta/kinda hurts, but it's not too bad. It can be mostly ignored. But every now and then... you move a certain way or you pick up something a bit incorrectly... or you don't do your back-strengthening exercises as often as you know you should... or you bend over a few degrees more than you should...

Or it's Thursday morning and your name ends in a vowel...

Whammo!!!

In other words, sometimes the hurt comes when you do that stupid thing. But other times it pops in and says HELLO for no apparent reason!

But of course there obviously was a reason for the pain in your back. You did do something dumb. But your lower back is a sneaky son-of-a-gun and can spark up hours and hours after you did your inadvertent miscue and it can be extremely difficult to ascertain when the injury actually took place.

So sometime Saturday I apparently shook hands with Mr. Stupid. I bent or reached or stretched or twisted or lifted or... Who the hell knows.

I woke up Sunday in my usual way – with a trip to the bathroom. No surprise there. But when I stood up and walked the 12 steps to the can and had to do it half-bent over, I realized that sometime the day before I'd made one of those boo-boos and I was now entering a period I like to refer to as payback time.

I'd gone through this rigamarole before, I wasn't a newcomer to this party, and I knew that it usually took from 3 days to a week-and-a-half to get back to the modest physical state I call normal. Occasionally longer. But each episode I go through occurs when I'm older than before, obviously, so what has happened in the past is only a possibility of what will occur in the here-and-now. So...

Sunday was a not-so-nice day, lower-back speaking. I took pills and smeared several flavors of either hot-feeling or cold-feeling goop on my back. Some of the products promised both! Hot ice or cold fire. Seemed a bit contradictory. Anyhow, after taking the painkillers and smearing the goop I dug out my wife's blue aluminum walking cane that we'd saved from an old injury of hers and used it to get around the rest of the day. I just couldn't straighten up much – when I tried to that ol' thunderbolt would z-z-z-zap my back and I'd yelp like a beaten puppy. I had to stay bent over a bit just to cope. My wife and I had an movie date planned with another couple for later that afternoon and she asked me if I wanted to cancel. I said I'd tough it out, so we went to the movies and a dinner afterward and I muddled through somehow albeit looking more like Quasimodo than anything human and bipedal. Thankfully the activities of movie-watching and meal-eating were all mostly sedentary, so I could mostly sit and sitting wasn't nearly as painful as walking was.

Sunday finally ended and I relished hitting the bed that evening. I could lay without pain and that was a wonderful, wonderful thing.

Monday was a holiday at my place of employment and would have been another day of rest for my barking back, but I'd volunteered to work and was obligated to go in. I have a sit-down office kind of job, so I thought it ought not to be too tough. Moving around that morning was even more painful than the day before and I said “ouch – ouch – ouch” a lot, but I managed. I did notice that our dog kind of shied away from me most of the day. Probably my unmanly whimpering or something like that which spooked him.

It's now around 9 o'clock in the evening and my work shift is over half done. I just returned from a trip down the hall to get some water and discovered that I could walk pretty much upright and that the pain had subsided considerably.

Perhaps it's time for some quiet celebration? Or is this improvement just a chimera, just a product of pain pills and aromatic ointment?

I'm hoping, dare I say it, that I might be seeing the beginning of the end of this latest episode of lumbar lunacy. Or is it the end of the beginning of the episode? Or not?

I guess only time will tell.

But I'm really looking forward to gettin' back to normal. I got stuff to do!

Wish me luck.