My lower back counts me down to mortality
I threw my back out. It happened as I was out for a pre-dawn run. One moment I was a gliding athletic superman, the picture of health. The next, blam!, I was hobbled and shuffling, one hand on my spine and one foot in the grave. After a few minutes I was able to gingerly jog home. For the next couple of weeks my exercise routine was limited to walks and stretching.
Among the things that my brothers and I inherited from our father is that we’re tall and we all have janky backs. I woke up with my first sore back on my thirtieth birthday. At the time, I thought, so much for my youth. That was 27 years ago.
My back episodes are often multi-step disasters. There is a priming incident—I think of it as pulling the pin on a grenade—with a random delay of 0 seconds to three weeks until the actual explosion.
This time, there were two possible priming incidents. The first was a hike on my last trip to Taiwan. The path between Tiger Mountain and Elephant Mountain in Taipei is mostly stone stairs up and down. It was belting rain and the path was slippery and during a descent I slipped on the edge of a step and landed on the next step down. It was just a few centimeters, but my knee was locked and I felt the shockwave go through my hips and into my lower back with a flash of pain. I thought, gonna pay for that later.
The second possible priming incident was the trip home, later that week.
If you gathered the world’s greatest scientists and asked them to create a device to destroy the human spine with maximum efficiency, they would create a baggage carousel. Consider: after twelve hours of enforced immobility in a seat with an interstellar void where lumbar support should be, you will have to drag an awkwardly shaped, 23-kilogram bag off a moving belt and over the lip of the carousel. This will require you to bend from the waist in exactly the way you are warned to never do when lifting heavy objects. If you’re unlucky and your bag is on the inside of the belt, god help you.
Imagethief 