Sometimes I imagine that I am in a time loop. That my life is only capable of extending to a certain point before I reach a door that is meant to represent change. Instead, the door leads me directly back to the beginning of the cycle. I walk, and run, and prance my way through everyday events until I reach that damnedable door. The whole process begins again.
Today was a bad pain day, fitting given that I had my appointment with the Good Doctor. It was the sort of morning where it felt like the pain was leaking from my spine and staining my hips, my thighs, and even my ass. My ass, for god’s sake. This is mechanical pain, coming from the arthritis. I assumed it’s because the weather is properly cold now. This mechanical pain is the sort that claws into your body and doesn’t let go no matter how much morphine or baclofen or kittens you throw at it. It’s a vibrant, hot, red and black pain.
In the last two years my pain has gotten worse, and with it I assumed so did my curve. Perhaps the only highlight of the visit was learning that my lower curve has settled nicely at it’s 45-49 degree range. It hasn’t moved and likely won’t anymore. Hooray for me!
But at the same time it was some of the worst news I could have imagined. 50 degrees is the magic number. That is when the specialists go from shrugging their shoulders and saying “meh?” when you ask about surgery, to rushing you into the OR and rubbing iodine over your back themselves. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t want more surgery. The concept of my spine being almost fully fused is troubling.
But I’ve learned to live with a fused spine. I’ve adjusted my life to it and I get by even without being able to bend over to tie my shoes. What I still find myself struggling with every day is the inconsistencies in pain. One day is good. One day is bad. One day is puppies and cotton candy and the next the puppies have rabies and the cotton candy is actually some sort of snake that is propelled by rockets made out of spiders. And while I can predict when snake-spider-rocket days might occur, it’s fairly hit and miss for the most part. And not knowing when I will be in that sort of pain is exhausting. You feel as if you can’t make plans, can’t make promises. You never know what sort of person you will be when you wake up in the morning.
Because the pain comes out of nowhere and it infects your life like those damned rabid puppies spreading through a daycare.
If the doctor has told me that the time had come to fuse my lower spine I would have been a-okay with that, because there is a slight possibility that fusing those two vertebrae would decrease some of my mechanical pain.
Maybe.
Then again, maybe not.
So I open the door and I walk through, back to the start of the cycle. I look back and see all my friends and family walking through the same door, yet somehow being able to reach another path that isn’t open to me. I have so many questions. When can I finally step onto that new path? What preparations do I have to make? Can I speed up this process? No. I am shunted back to the start of the cycle. Another year of waiting, of snakes and spiders nibbling on my nerves and burrowing into my body.
I’ll give myself one day to be sad, to feel a bit of self-pity that this will be another year when this cannot progress. I’ll put all my focus onto writing, of being a good partner to my husband and support him as he has supported me not only today, but every day rabid puppies and spider rockets strike me down. I’ll work and save, and in October I will go to Japan and see another culture with towering mountains and verdant plains. I’ll snuggle my cats when I feel sad and knit my blanket when I am lazily watching TV.
And I will have pain, every day, because the cycle is just starting again.
The Code Series 