I was lying in my attic bedroom reading a book, when my husband came up to speak with me. I wriggled over to make room for him and heard a muffled sound like a wet branch snapping. As I stood up, an electric bolt of pain shot down my leg.
Time suspended. After an x-ray, I learned that the disc between L5 and S1 in my lumbar spine had burst, the gelatinous core herniated out, pinning down the nerve root and driving pain down my right hip into my leg. My physiatrist kept insisting that if I used the elliptical on its most difficult setting and did my clam shells, I’d improve.
My life shrunk. Standing up was less painful than sitting. The worst was getting up from a chair. I stood all day, like a horse, at my kitchen counter trying to write in my journal or watching foreign films on my computer. I drank one glass of rose after another and took so much Extra Strength Tylenol that the backs of my hands were sometimes black. My husband made me chicken sandwiches; he did the laundry and the dishes. He helped me in and out of the shower, he tied my shoelaces and held me steady, as I struggled up and down the stairs. His body had changed too, not damaged like mine, but beaten down by the grim inevitability of what our future might hold.
