Paying the Price

Although I made great progress on a nice looking bridge for our garden railroad over the past few days, I am now paying the price!

As most people who know me should already know, my original disability is due to an active career in the Air Force resulting in extensive spinal injuries.  I was left with two herniated disks, four bulging disks, six compressed disks, spinal stenosis, and a broken up vertebra in my neck.  Needless to say, I'm in pain 24 hours a day for the past twenty-nine years.  Some days are worse than others but the pain is always there.

Many years ago, two separate surgeons in two separate periods reviewed my MRIs and regrettably informed me that they could fix one or two areas of my spine but the rest of the damage would still exist making it seem like no progress had been made by the surgeries.  They each looked me up and down as I stood next to them (at two separate times) and basically said the same thing, "whatever you are doing, keep doing it because you should not be standing here...  looking at these images, I expected to see someone in a wheelchair.  You really need to keep up with whatever you are doing for physical therapy."  And I do continue to do physical therapy everyday for the past twenty-nine years.

After all this time, I have a pretty good idea of where my physical limits are when it comes to these spinal injuries but I do occasionally reinjure some part of my spine.  Sometimes I go back to using a cane...  sometimes I'm bedridden...  and sometimes the pain is simply debilitating enough to take my breath away.  Right now, the pain is simply debilitating enough to take my breath away and make sleeping very difficult.

This is something I've had to endure since my first line-of-duty spinal injury in 1997.  My second line-of-duty spinal injury a year later was far worse requiring 40 hours a week of rehab and physical therapy for four to six weeks.  I couldn't walk after that second injury.  

So, in the big scheme of things, what i am experiencing today isn't all that bad.  It is cutting into my sleep and the pain is a solid six or seven.  

Chronic injury and chronic illness is something that affects you physically and emotionally.  Constantly being knocked back down to Day 0 of the injury or illness really affects you emotionally too.  

On the positive side, this week ahead of us promises to be rainy, for the most part, so it is a perfect time to stay indoors and recover.