LUMBAGO

LUMBAGO

I awoke to a backache. The room was dark and even through the eyelids I couldn’t make out any hint of light which usually seeps through even in the darkest of dens. Pitch black. I Spocked an eyebrow but even that narrowest of eye slits permits no light to hit the retina. Blackness.

It occurs to me at last that there is no light in this abode and I have to recall just where I am; and I panic just a moment as if suddenly coming out of a blackout crazily disturbed when I find I am not where I last thought I was.  And where that was I do not know but the panicked thought that I might have been drinking is wild and unnerving and my heart is racing and the sweat is already trickling down the small of my back as my other eye pops open still to confirm the pitchness of the surroundings.

The ache reappears but it is much less and now I realize it is not the back at all but the neck, and it is not a new sensation but familiar neck  pain that I wake up with every day and as I arch my back I find that the disconcerting lower back pain that I had misapprehended that awakened me was truly a misconstruction, a symptomatic dislocation brought on by  environmental anxiety the solution of which I still have not accounted for.

Yes, things are beginning to make sense. I recall finally, that I haven’t had that back pain for two years now, ever since I changed that mattress to that support foam, one of the “Tempurpedic” mattresses.  That backache that I used to complain about all the time; the excuse for pain pills, inability to sleep and nightcaps.

So that must mean… I’m in that apartment, that basement apartment, practically so at least, dark most times of the day, musty, dusty, depressing. On the longest day of the year it gets an hour of light. Otherwise it, like the Antarctic’s winter, remains in months of perpetual twilight or darkness the remainder of the year. It matches my mood too.

It’s a marvel that I was able to get sober here at all. I guess that’s because I forced myself to get out of here daily, get out, go to a meeting, see people, write, go to meetings, socialize, write, and go to another meeting. I’d say work, but that territory has been severely circumscribed, first by my recovery and then by the restrictions placed on my license by the state.

So, in many ways, the terrain of the apartment pretty much mirrors the terrain of my recovery.  It is mostly pitched, umbral and penumbral.  

And the fear and discomfort of that wakening anxiety slowly drifts away as knowledge seeps into my consciousness. Ah. Now I remember. It was that dark that tricked me, not a real black out, just a figurative one.

So it is rather strange to be awakening to a real lumbar pain these past five days, with true bright light stabbing through the eye lids, and the requirement of a second pillow to squinch over the head to block out the offending rays and the pounding incessant travel alarm alerting me to the 7:30 meeting this morning, this Independence Day. The “Posturepaedic” mattress in the family house is so hard that it not only causes searing lumbar pain but has actually caused a bruise to form on the right hip which I presume I slept on last night.  This, the result of that Berkowitzian trait of loss of gluteal adiposity after the age of sixty; a trait that is highly sought after in many quarters but is literally sorely missed in mine.

Yes I said the “family house”. That house that I was exiled from two years ago for sins against a particular humanity; and towards which I have been diligently working for reinstatement into that “humanity”.  I suppose the fact that I was asked to watch the “kids”, (that is the two aging dogs), is a sign that I can be more or less trusted or that we are both so low on funds that hiring a dog watcher is so out of the budget that it would preclude her vacation in the first, second and third place.

But I am happy to do this if only to get the heck out of that dungeon that I have been holing up in for the past two years. I have been wanting to spend time wandering about a house in which I could stay in a different room for an hour each, ten hours out of the day without even going into the basement, whereas I could not do that for even an hour in my cave.

I can spend hours listening to the birds on the porch, listening to music while reading books, magazines; and being out of doors, without having to get out of a bathrobe. I can talk with extraordinary company, like Chessie and QTPI and get thoughtful, quiet contemplative replies back. Mostly in the form of slobbering and snoring but I get their attentions nonetheless. Of course, it helps to have a biscuit also to start the conversation.

The joy of light is wonderful. Light makes the mood… well, light. Light symbolizes optimism. Light implies less weightiness. Light, being the opposite of dark is the opposite of oppressiveness, depressiveness, evil, bad thinking and… stasis.  

When I think of pathology in humans I view stasis as a pathological phenomenon. When stasis occurs, bad things happen. Stasis of the blood causes clots. Bad if it is in the middle of the circulatory system say in the heart (infarct) or the brain, (stroke). Or, biliary stasis will cause jaundice and mechanical hepatitis and gallstones. Or urinary stasis will cause infection. Bowel blockage, untreated, will cause a rupture and death.  

Nothing good comes from stasis.

So I have really enjoyed coming out of the dark as a reminder of what the light is and always has been. I also have to remember that light and dark are complementary. My appreciation of the light was never so great as when I had to slog through this dark; my understanding of my alcoholic effect on my family was never so deep as when I had to live with the consequence of that action.

I lived with severe lumbar pain from a “Posturepaedic” in the light. But the relief of the back pain from the “Tempurpedic”  had a quid pro quo with it, …….

I had to live with that relief for sometime in the dark.

© res 7/4/2011