Trail of Tears

“Thou cold sciatica, cripple our senators, that their limbs may halt as lamely as their manners.”

– W. Shakespeare, The Life of Timon of Athens (1564)

Forgive me my own lame manners, but I'd like to whine for a minute about my life-halting sciatica.

A few days before my birthday - January 25th - I injured myself playing basketball. Much as I would like to say that I banged my head on the rim while duplicating Vince Carter's "le dunk de la mort," the reality wasn't quite as majestic.

There was only an ignoble, poorly-planned, head-down drive through the paint from which I learned, for the upteenth time in my life, that two solids could not occupy the same space at the same moment.

Neck go "crunch." Neck hurt. Bulging disc and sciatica ensue.

Now, according to all the experts - my orthopedist, my physical therapist, and (most importantly) my mom - back pain is a notoriously elusive foe. So I shouldn't start to read too much into the fact that it's been such a protracted injury. But optimism of that sort can be hard to come by when I'm locked in a staring contest with the increasingly gray-haired man in my mirror. Even if the duration of my recovery is not necessarily a function of my age, it still feels that way. And, when you're stretched out on your bedroom floor for several weeks, in what seems like a one-man sleepover party that will not die, feelings tend to carry more weight than logic.

Thank goodness for home remedies. My favorite? Brainstorming elaborate, hyperbolic metaphors for the pain in my back. It's not so weird, when you think about it. I've heard that cancer patients often nickname their tumors. It helps them visualize their opponent and empowers them in the face of the disease. Kind of like Peter Jackson's decision to prematurely identify Saruman as a villain in the first Lord of the Rings. It would have been much harder for the Fellowship - and the audience - to get motivated against the forces of darkness if their nemesis was just a giant, floating, flaming Eye.

And thinking takes your mind off the discomfort. There's plenty of evidence to suggest this is so. C.S. Lewis wrote this about such quirks of perspective:

Human intellect is incurably abstract....[The] only realities we experience are concrete - this pain, this pleasure, this dog, this man. While we are loving the man, bearing the pain, enjoying the pleasure, we are not intellectually apprehending Pleasure, Pain or Personality. When we begin to do so, on the other hand, the concrete realities sink to the level of mere instances or examples: we are no longer dealing with them, but with that which they exemplify. This is our dilemma - either to taste and not to know or to know and not to taste....The more lucidly we think, the more we are cut off: the more deeply we enter into reality, the less we can think....'If only my toothache would stop, I could write another chapter about Pain.' But once it stops, what do I know about pain?

So I concentrate on the spasms, the soreness, the sharp pangs. I trace the pain's migration from the nape of my neck to the small of my back to my right buttock to my lower thigh and then - it presumably having scored a cheap, round-trip ticket on priceline.com - all the way back again. And this concentration, at least some of the time, has taken me away from the actual feeling. It also revealed, incidentally, that the old song has it all wrong. The neckbone is actually connected to the legbone. Who knew?

Without further ado, I give to you some of the metaphors I've developed for my roving back pain. Yes, English majors, technically these are similes, but let's not get bent out of shape. That job currently belongs to my back.

My back pain is like...

• ...pumping quarters into the Whack-a-Mole at Chuck E. Cheese. I beat those little buggers down with the Advil hammer, but they pop their well-worn heads out again, impervious to the blows of my punishing foam. "Back-a-Mole" would have worked, also.
  
• ...getting to the upper levels on Nintendo's Duck Hunt. The waterfowl are flying fast and furious and that damn dog is just chortling his head off. Oh, and every time he snickers, I writhe in agony.
• ...a sophisticated terrorist organization. Raise the threat level to "Red" and stock up on Sterno, but there's always one more splinter cell waiting in the wings. They can, will, and do carry out their godless mayhem independent of centralized direction.
• ...watching the E! network for any length of time.
• ...playing peek-a-boo with a baby. Except I'm the baby. And the back pain is the adult. And every time the pain covers its face, I think it's gone. But it's not gone. It's still there. And it's feeling superior with its fancy, "fully-developed skull" and uncanny ability to hold its head up. I drool. It laughs. My response? A gurgle or two before rapidly crapping my pants.
• ...a tumbleweed, rolling around the streets of early 90's L.A., hoping for the seed it carries to find purchase. It makes it all the way to the beach, to the bosom of the Pacific Ocean, maybe even a trampoline party at the Malibu estate of porn magnate Jackie Treehorn. In the background, we hear the soothing narration of The Stranger (voiced by Sam Elliott) and a cowboy choral outfit called the the Sons of the Pioneers. Somewhere in a supermarket, the Dude is buying milk...WAIT! I think I've seen this somewhere before.
• ...a frat-boy road trip. It hired a gaz-guzzling RV, from which it dumps litter and the contents of its septic tank without a thought or care. Pathologically, indiscriminately spoiling the landscape - the height of douchebaggery - it leaves every place it goes that much worse off.
  
• ...a family of Dust-Bowl refugees. Homeless, jobless, feckless, toothless, they make their way across the panhandle of Oklahoma (my latissimus dorsi) singing tuneless songs to the joyless strains of a nearly stringless banjo.
• ...a pain in the ass, only higher.
  

Ahhhhh. I feel better already.