Back Pain

Fireside Solitude

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Sitting, again. Sitting still feels like a treat, so I relish it for the brief time it will last before pain returns. Pain that sears through my legs, requiring my body to form a total, untouched horizon on my parents’ brown leather sofa. Occasionally, my knees rise to form the snowy tip of a tall, tall mountain (the Semi-Supine) rising out of the still silent Torso Plain. Then, more pain. At a stroke, the mountain dissolves. I may fall asleep.

Gonzalo skimmed us last night and now we have balding trees and a carpeted lawn. Still occasionally blustery, the fire is lit and I’m grateful to simply sit. Sit, before more pain. Is pain the new punctuation of my life? Perhaps.

A relationship ended last night. Ten months. Forty one weeks. Two hundred and eighty nine days. More pointless to count the days than to sit atop our new outdoor carpet and count its leaves, though. Sooner or later they’ll be raked and vacuumed. Not yet, though. There is green among the reds and the browns of the ended relationship: greens of friendship. These, I hope, will endure beyond our 289. The trees here may be balder, but bald trees give way to more sunlight.

Gonzalo’s Tail

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Grateful to sit for once, I’m sitting (what a treat to be able to say it: sitting) in my parents’ comfortable home in suburban England. On the ten o’clock news: Hurricane Gonzalo hitting the UK and Lynda Bellingham, a popular actress and TV personality, dies of cancer after stopping treatment of terminal cancer.

Gonzalo has raged across the Atlantic. We expect the tail end of it overnight. The tail end; oh, the tail end. I long for the tail end. If this moment, right now, was the tail end of the past five years, I would climb the stairs tonight, in pain, yes, but a happy man. The final five of my twenties have been an inglorious and almost deadly affair.

Lynda Bellingham, though. What an inspiration the woman is. Sweeping the irritating fact that everyone who dies is a saint in the eyes of 21st Century Britons, her honesty about wanting the pain to end was truly inspiring. A positive approach to accepting the defeat of pain and, ultimately, death.

I go back to lying down. I’m not saying I want to die; far from it! Rather, I would like a conclusion to this chapter and a resolution to the mindbending cliffhangers posed by my story of the past five years.

I think of one aspect of the past five years and that aspect is back pain. Back pain is the most recent plague that has been set upon me. Plagues of the past, for me, have been dramatic, life-threatening, funny (yeah, funny), but never as mundane and as fundamentally undermining as back pain (cue the eye-roll) ; boring old back pain. Friends forget it (oh yeah, your back). Colleagues resent it (what, back pain, still?). The dog enjoys it (oh good, a daytime playmate). Family join the daily grind, adding in small number to the hidden, apparently voiceless, community of afflictees and their supporters.

When I get to the end of my yellow brick road and face the prospect of departing Earth for good, I’ll look back on this time, right now, smile and face my tail end confidently, like Lynda Bellingham. I’ll know that this time, right now, wasn’t much of a tail end after all; that back pain (eye-roll) wasn’t such a defining plague after all; that I can face my tail end confidently, feeling I’ve done so successfully many times before. That’s my hope.

In the meantime, it’s time for more painkillers. Let’s hope this autumn is the tail end of the eye-roll inducing back pain. Back pain has given me a need to vent, so here goes…