Singing My Praises

I've been going through a spell of doing nothing. Other than work (which I admit tends to be substantial since I'm teaching an overload and one of my classes is a time-intensive online class) I've been doing very little. Every evening when I get home, I'd just sit and watch TV for my two or three hours before bedtime. Even when I'd get up after eight or nine hours of sleep, I'd feel tired.

Then on the weekends, I'd take a couple of naps each day and watch TV (around my required shopping and dish-washing and meal-cooking.) I'd blame my laziness on my back. I'd try to take walks, but my lower back and left hip would ache and ping so that I'd finally give up and limp home. But it also seemed the more I lay around, the worse my back hurt.

Then toward the end of 2006, in trying to use up my medical account (I'd miscalculated what we would need, and we still had a couple of thousand dollars to use up) I went to the doctor for my back.

"Why didn't you say anything about your back before?" he asked. After all, I had been there a couple of times in the preceeding months for other complaints, and I had just told him I'd been having this problem with my back for about a year. I explained that my pain wasn't constant, and I always thought that I'd just pulled my back, that all I had to do was figure out what I'd done to reinjure it and avoid that activity. (Of course, lifting and carrying five-gallon buckets full of water didn't help.) But as time went on, it seemed like I could do nothing -- just take a step -- and reinjure it. And the pain lasted longer, shooting down my leg at times, and keeping me awake. I told him I thought my sciatica was pinched.

Well, you know how doctors are. They don't want to hear your diagnosis. They want to hear the symptoms and then tell you their diagnosis (which often is the exact same thing you thought!) "IF your sciatica is pinched, we can do something about that," he said, in a tone that implied, "You should have told me earlier." So he sent me to get an MRI on my lower spine and left hip. Getting that done took several weeks, and they told me it'd take awhile to get the results back to my doctor. So I waited for the call from my doctor for me to make an appointment and do whatever it is he can do. With no call forthcoming, I finally called the doctor's office.

"Oh, yes," said the receptionist. "Your results came back on that MRI, and they are normal. You don't need another appointment."

"What?!" I practically started crying. "Why am I in so much pain then?" After settling down a little bit, I thought I need to go to my chiropractor. In fact, I'd gone for this very problem before, but Larry Marrich was a bit hesitant to do much until I'd gotten X-rays to make sure I didn't have any badly ruptured disks. Perhaps the MRI would serve, I thought.

As it turned out, I still needed X-rays. Together with the MRI report and the X-rays, Dr. Marrich started working on me. He said there was a little bit of extruding disk, which could cause pressure on the sciatica nerve, but it wasn't more than an average woman my age could expect. (In other words, the pain was real, it just wasn't really obvious, and that's why it wasn't constant.) Three times a week, then two times a week, then once a week, he'd treat my lower back. Now we're down to once every two weeks.

Now get this. Last Tuesday, I found a couple of workout videos on TV that run from 5:00 to 6:00 a.m., my "free" or discretionary time. I worked out about 40 minutes EVERY morning, Tuesday to Friday. In the evenings, I haven't been watching TV. Instead, I've been cleaning, vacuuming, training Shiloh, sewing, ironing -- just whatever I feel like, but all good stuff.

And this weekend: not counting the hours I spent driving into town to drop off and pick up my husband's truck at the shop, I have patched the 1 ft. by 1 ft. hole under the sink in one bathroom, a similar hole in the other bathroom, washed two loads of clothes, trimmed my leggy plants (mostly geraniums) transplanting the cuttings, rearranged the outside "furniture" so that Shiloh can't climb up to the cat-window, dropped off some donations to a thrift store, done my shopping at two stores, changed out all the cat boxes, changed the sheets on my bed, cooked the meals for next week. Okay, that's about it. I'm still proud of myself. Those patches in the wall have needed to be done for more than a year. The cats have gotten to where they pull the cabinet doors open, and go into the wall to look for mice, which, of course, they bring back alive and put in the bathtub. And the mice have been coming into the house on their own and eating Shiloh's food (I've seen the evidence.)

It's amazing how much I can do at home -- especially when I have papers to grade!