Let me tell you the scariest episode from the last few months. This is the story which, just seven days past, feels imprinted in my mind as That Sunday. This is the story I probably will think of first when people ask me how bad it really got. (Do you hear the hubris here, my use of the past tense? My assuming it won’t ever be as bad again? My confidence that it can’t get worse?)
One week ago I sat down on my couch with a book, thinking I’d get through a few pages before finding something else to do with my quiet Sunday. But lately my couch and really, all chairs, have not agreed with me. Still, I curled my legs under me, I leaned to the right, I swung my legs left, I attempted to find a better spot. Then something happened. What exactly, I don’t know. I wish the moment had registered with a pop or a crack like other injuries. The herniated discs I’d been nursing for months did something, and I knew I was in trouble.
I shuffled to the kitchen, where I keep the stable of meds I’ve acquired, and managed to make it to the sink and back to the kitchen counter with a glass of water before I got stuck. My nerves were screaming out and the muscles in my leg seized. The pain would surely subside, I wagered. I tried to shuffle, even to pivot, but everything made me wail. I waited, attempting every few minutes to maneuver myself away from the counter I was by now clutching, but nothing worked.
The thing you learn when you begin to see lots of doctors for unrelenting pain is on their intake forms they’ll have a list of adjectives they ask you to check off to describe your pain. Stabbing? Searing? Cold? Throbbing? Shooting? Sharp? Apparently these different words can indicate different conditions to doctors. But even with so many colorful options, pain is very difficult to describe.
No one would ask me to chart my pain on a scale from 1 to 10 if it were attached to an apparent wound, like my intestines falling out of my stomach, or my arm jutting out of its shoulder socket. But this injury is invisible, and to explain it I can only use numbers, proxies, metaphors: it feels like my ankle is being sent through a garbage compactor, or, it feels like someone with steel hands is twisting my pelvis off my hips. It feels like I’ve had a three-month-long cramp in my right butt. (Okay, that one’s rather direct.)
That day it felt like someone set off a grenade inside my leg. I felt myself nauseous with the overwhelming electricity of the pain, and alone in my apartment, panic began to overtake me like hives climbing up my body. I started hyperventilating. My phone was back by the couch.
Even after I decided what I’d have to do it took me a while to commit to it: I forced myself to fall to the floor, a million fireworks popping inside my body the whole way down, and once there I used my arms to drag my body across the floor to the couch.
And here is where I got luckier than any human can hope to be. I made one call and on the second ring, Mariah picked up. She is a friend, who also happens to be the person I’d trust most in a crisis, and who happens to live a few blocks from me, and who happens to have a set of keys to my place so she could let herself in, and who happened to be nearby, and happened to be able to come to me. When I say lucky, I really mean it.
And Mariah came, and with so much calmness let me choke out a few sobs, then brought me more meds, and soothed me with the kind of distracting small talk that I think probably helps people in shock keep from dissolving. And then she lifted me and more or less carried my body to bed. Mariah put meds and water next to me and offered to leave some food on my nightstand, and I foolishly turned her down. When I woke a few hours later, still in pain but at least in bed, I was clutching my phone.
But as evening turned to night, and long after I’d drained my glass, I knew I’d have to make a move. And so, clenching my teeth, I rolled off my bed and crawled to the toilet. And then I army crawled back to the kitchen, dragging my right leg, which was somehow both simultaneously dead weight and aflame. I’d taken so many painkillers I knew I needed food to pad my stomach, but I could not stand upright. From the floor I reached for utensils, I pulled open the fridge, grabbing cold leftovers and yogurt, and I ate on the kitchen floor, on my hands and knees, with a potholder beneath my knees. I was not alone–D kept me company over FaceTime–but that night, hovering over my food, shoveling bites into my mouth with a shaky hand, I indulged in so much self-pity. And then, like a true millennial, after wiping up my tears I took a photo of my picnic.
The next morning I asked my doctor for the Vicodin I’d repeatedly turned down (which Kate, blessedly, picked up for me while also choosing a walking cane for me) and got the spinal injection he’d warned would only buy me time, at best, while I prepare for a longer-term solution.
That was one week ago, and already so much more pain has flowed through me since then that it feels like another lifetime.
I will admit that I have never thought of myself as a particularly courageous or hardy person, and that part of what makes me want to write this here and share it is that I’m a little taken aback, and maybe even impressed, that last Sunday, when it seemed my pain might swallow me whole, I did not back down. I have inside me a will to live, it turns out, and I will try not to forget it.
