Beasts And Back Surgeries
It’s been nearly two years since I had back surgery.
At the time I couldn’t tell you how I injured my back. I went to bed one night, and the next morning I simply couldn’t move. What I was experiencing was a singularly unique form of pain. If I had to describe it, concentrating the feeling into a pointed description, I would have to say that it felt as if a doomed wild beast had a death grip on my lower spine, claws sunk deep in the bone, twisting my nerves out by their roots while I lay on my stomach nearly paralyzed, unable to roll over to defend myself from this ferocious, invisible attacker.
After twenty minutes of incremental attempts I was finally able to fall out of bed and crawl to the cell phone where I called in sick for work. An hour later I had somehow managed to make it to my feet, where I stood hunched over like an old man with a century’s worth of regret on his shoulders, slowly shuffling forward as I inched my way around the kitchen trying to make sense of just what the hell was happening to me.
To make a long story stuffy, I saw my doctor who referred me to a surgeon who scheduled an immediate MRI. As soon as the surgeon saw my MRI he booked me for surgery. A week later I was being wheeled down a hospital corridor, needles resting in my veins with a concoction of beautiful drugs swiftly blanking out reality. During all the commotion I was more worried about Karin than I was about the upcoming surgery because I could see through her brave front, as she held my hand, that she was feeling sick to her stomach seeing me like that.
Afterwards, when I woke up in my hospital bed, the doc told me that he had never seen anything like that before. Apparently, some form of benign growth had latched itself around my lower spine, fiendishly compressing the nerve (see MRI below).
Let me tell ya, with all honesty, that’s something I never want to experience again.
It took me a year to fully heal from the surgery. I’m still careful while lifting weights, but at least I’ve recovered. I’m now benching 330lbs and training for a run up Mt. Whitney. Thank God for modern medicine. I can’t imagine living 100 years ago and having to suffer with a similar malady. How someone could have lived with something like this without modern medicine is unimaginable to me.
Circled in red is the odd benign growth that was causing me so much pain
I find it really odd that some how I found your blog and have been following it and I to have had the same back surgery. Mine started the same way and just a slight pain that a few months later required major back surgery. Right before surgery I have a part of my disk break off and get lodged into my sciatic nerve. Talk about pain!
You never fully recover from a back surgery in my opinion. If you don’t stay active then you are screwed.
Oh the horror stories I could tell about my back leading up to and then for the next two years after surgery.
Fitness is the key now. I never want to have back surgery again!
I couldn’t agree with you more regarding the pain involved with back injuries. And yes, it does take quite a bit to bounce back from such a surgery. In the gym I can no longer do seated cable rows (now have to use the machine that supports my chest) nor squats in the cage (again, have to use a machine that supports the back).
But at least I’m mobile, and no longer bedridden and stoned on pain killers. Heh…