Living within an uncooperative body

First, let me say that I know my maladies don’t compare to those of a lot of other less fortunate people… those with serious issues like cancer, MS, cerebral palsy, or any number of other debilitating or life-threatening diseases. That said, I just felt the need to “vent” today.

What a difference a few months can make. At the beginning of this year, I had such grand aspirations. I had reached a point physically where I felt that my health needed a bit of improvement. Over the past several years I had gradually gained a few pounds here and there, until I had finally reached a point where none of my clothes fit anymore. In addition to that, I didn’t “feel” healthy. I occasionally felt short of breath after minimal physical exertion. Realizing that I was going to be turning 50 this year and that at times I felt even older than that physically, I set some goals. One of those goals was to lose about 60 or so pounds over the next several months. Another was that I was going to be taking my newly sculpted body on more travel excursions, and so I began planning a vacation trip to Scandinavia at the end of the summer.

January was a good month. I started walking regularly during the weeks at first, and riding my bicycle on the weekends. A few weeks into January, I bought an elliptical machine and moved my workouts indoors, so that I could kill two proverbial birds with one stone… being able to exercise while viewing some of the TV shows that I watched regularly. By the end of January, things were going well. I had changed my eating habits a bit, resisting the temptation to eat sugar-filled and/or fattening foods most of the time. However, I think the exercise regimen was the biggest boost to my goal of losing weight. By the end of January, I had already lost 10 pounds.

As February rolled in, I was still on track. I was no longer going on walks, instead opting for the more intensive elliptical workouts. During February, I completed elliptical machine workouts on 16 of the 28 days, and also rode my bicycle for 20+ and 30+ miles on two of the weekend days. By February 24, I reached the point where I had already shed 20 pounds from my frame. I was proud, and happy at how easily things seemed to be coming along on my way toward my goal. However, it was near the end of February that things would also start changing for the worse. Near the beginning of March, I wrote a post about how my exercise regimen had encountered a hiccup.

I’ve heard some people say that they have gone their entire lives without a headache, or back pain, or any other such acute malady. I am always envious, because I am not one of those people. For most of my life I have dealt with some manner of either occasional or chronic headaches or back pain. I think that some of it may be due to a couple of the car accidents I was involved in as a child, but some of it may be genetics as well (my younger brother experiences migraine headaches). Toward the end of February this year, I felt the first twinges of low back pain. I don’t know what caused it to begin… I didn’t fall, or lift anything wrong, or twist my back… I just woke up one morning with a twinge of pain. As I mentioned in some of those previous posts earlier this year, it was enough to interfere with my workouts, and enough to spur me to start revisiting the chiropractor’s office (I have continued receiving chiropractic treatments ever since, with two different chiropractors, in an effort to return to “normal”).

During the first couple weeks of March, I attempted to “work through the pain” when things didn’t seem so bad. I exercised on the elliptical machine a total of 4 times during the first 2 weeks of March, and went on one 20 mile bicycle ride. I have not logged one day of exercise since March 15th. Since that low, 20-lbs-lost point on February 24, my weight has been slowly rising back up to a point that is now only 5 pounds shy of where I began at the beginning of the year.

Some people will tell you that back pain is “all in your head.” Those are obviously people who have never experienced chronic back pain. When I got out of bed this morning, I was stabbed with an immediate “ohmygod, I cannot walk” pain in my lower back. I hobbled my way in toward the kitchen and living room, where I have an inversion table. I had planned to invert my body, to stretch out the joints and muscles of my lower back as I have been doing often of late. However, the pain in my back prevented me from even bending over to lock my feet into the restraints. After my failed attempt, I hobbled into the kitchen, body askew to favor the painful area of my back. I took my normal daily vitamins, minerals, and prescription meds. In addition, I took 1000mg of ibuprofen (5 over-the-counter tablets), hoping to experience some relief within the hour. I then made a cup of coffee and went to the computer to check emails and such (I didn’t feel that I could stand to make breakfast quite yet). After a little while, I finally went back into the kitchen to make breakfast. Unfortunately, the ibuprofen had barely made a dent in the pain. So, after breakfast I sat down to do what I have been doing the past couple of months when not at work. I watched TV, without the exercise.

It is hard to feel motivated to exercise when it feels like someone is jabbing an ice-pick into your lower back, and you know that you’ll feel every rotation of that hip joint as you’re working out. Every day I walk past that elliptical machine and feel guilty that I’m not using it to at least maintain, if not lose weight. Yet like the salivation of Pavlov’s dogs, whenever I think about exercising, I get a mental picture of the pain I would be experiencing and shy away from it. I know that it’s a Catch-22 situation… if I were to lose the weight and strengthen the muscles, some of the pain might diminish. But the pain keeps me from starting, especially on a day like today, a day that the pain is the worst it has been since it began back in February.

In addition to the back pain, another situation from a couple years ago has reared its ugly head again. As seen in the MRI taken 2 years ago, a couple of the vertebrae in my neck have been damaged somehow through the years. They don’t cause me any pain or keep me from turning my head and neck as any other person would do. However, occasionally the discs between them will start applying pressure on my spinal cord (you can see them doing this a bit in the pictures of the MRI). When this happens, I start losing some of the feeling in my fingers and they start to tingle. This has been happening as I’ve been typing this blog entry. The severity of the numbness and tingling sensation is usually dependent on the position of my head. If I turn my head a certain way it gets worse, so I spend a bit of time looking for a position to turn/keep my head so that the sensation is minimized.

I apologize for being a bit of a “whiner” today, but lately I’ve just been getting a bit frustrated with this faulty organic machine that my consciousness is residing within. When I made my vacation plans for later this year and paid for the plane tickets and hotels, I was still on track toward my weight-loss goals and looking forward to a large amount of walking from place to place once I arrived in Scandinavia. This morning I imagined what it might be like to awaken in a foreign city with incapacitating lower back pain. It was not a pretty sight, and something that I hope to avoid. If I was feeling the way I am today in January and February, I may have given my vacation plans a second thought and postponed the trip. Unfortunately I am now committed, with most everything paid for (and non-refundable). I just need to get my body to cooperate and get back on track!