Paying the Price

Although I made great progress on a nice looking bridge for our garden railroad over the past few days (see previous blog entries), 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 after two separate line-of-duty injuries.  

After the second injury, I was left with two herniated disks, four bulging disks, six compressed disks, spinal stenosis, thoracic osteophytosis, and a broken up vertebra in my cervical spine.  Needless to say, I've been in pain 24 hours a day for the past twenty-nine years.  Some days are worse than others but the pain is always there even on the best of days.

Many years ago, two separate surgeons in two separate periods reviewed my MRIs and regrettably informed me that they could possibly 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.  And, they pointed out that the success rate of these types of surgeries isn't all that great.  

Each of these surgeons, looked me up and down as I stood next to them (at two separate times) and basically said the same thing (I'm paraphrasing here, of course), "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 because it is clearly working."  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 buckle me at my knees.  Every day I experience enough pain to make breathing painful.  Right now, the pain is simply debilitating enough to take my breath away and make sleeping very difficult.  It is a constant pain on the left side of my upper back from my kidney to my shoulder blade.

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.  The rehab was pretty intense and whenever I reinjure myself, I'm always taken back to those painful days, emotionally, mentally and physically.

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 but it is nothing like some previous injuries.

Chronic injury and chronic illness is something that affects you physically, mentally and emotionally.  Constantly being knocked back down to Day 0 of the injury or illness really affects you emotionally.  It vividly reminds me of those early days of painful, exhausting rehab.  

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.

EDIT:  May 2, 2026 - It is now the day after I had written the blog entry above and I thought I should add a bit more to this blog entry so here I am.

As we were getting ready for bed last night, I did some very light physical therapy.  I felt that I was feeling well enough to attempt some very light physical therapy at this point.  I had been taking anti-inflammatories for a few doses at this point.  

I don't often get acute pain in this area of my spine so I had all sorts of ideas of possible causes running through my head...  the one herniated disk in my thoracic spine...  pancreatitis...  heart...  all could cause intense pain in this part of my back.  Plus, breathing was very painful too.  I really wanted to isolate the source of the pain even if only to ease my mind.  

I did some light yoga poses that are intended to open up the thoracic spine.  In short, I did some cat-cow stretches...  some child's pose stretching...  then, while standing, I did some of my usual physical therapy to see which motions triggered the pain.  The yoga poses definitely helped to loosen me up.  Well...  the anti-inflammatories did most of the work here but the yoga poses helped once the inflammation was taken down a few notches.  I couldn't have nor should not have attempted this during the very acute stage of this reinjury.

I found that bending my spine to the left triggered instant acute pain.  Bending my thoracic spine right, backward and forward was no more painful than usual but bending this part of my spine to the left was extremely painful.  Actually, I couldn't bend this direction without instant pain.  This triggered pain so instant that I stopped trying to bend in this direction.

This meant that as I bend to the left, this closes the gap between vertebra and discs on the left side of my spine.  Apparently, my previous herniation injury at around T6 (or T4/5?  I can't remember) has shifted to the left side and is impinging the nerves there affecting the left side of most of my back.  

This is good news since this bit of info now allows me to target my daily physical therapy to this specific injury.  Knowing exactly what is going on with the spine and doing the correct physical therapy minimizes the chances of accidentally making the injury worse.  Injuring any part of the spine is serious but injuring this area of the spine can result in catastrophic permanent damage and put me in a wheelchair.  

This morning, the left side of my back is more like feeling pins and needles as opposed to the intense pain I was feeling.  There is still pain but it has subsided significantly and I'm now feeling mild pins and needles across this area of my back.  This is a sign that I opened up the right part of my spine allowing for the nerves to begin to heal.  

So that is good news.  It is certainly better news than a heart attack or pancreatitis!