Four weeks after surgery, I’m still in horrific pain if I walk for ten minutes. I have epidural lipomatosis, which is embarrassing because it means that fat is pressing against my spinal cord. I’ve described this before here, but bear with me, please. There is a surprisingly happy ending.
I started having back pain years ago—who doesn’t? But it rapidly got worse. At its worst, now, I can’t walk more than ten minutes without severe pain in my lower back. My GP referred me to the Interventional Pain Clinic at Virginia Mason in Seattle.
I was, I suspect, at first misdiagnosed, and a doctor on whom I had a crush allowed me to go face down on a table with my butt exposed—how carefully did she peruse it?—not at all, right? before shooting radio waves into my back to burn what they suspected were the nerves causing the pain.
Nope, no help. Eventually, someone came up with the epidural hoo-haw diagnosis. The surgical solution was going to be a two-day affair and up to a year’s worth of recovery. I could tell that even the surgeons didn’t want to do it.
I obtained several second opinions, one of which was a literary achievement from a doc at the University of California-San Francisco. Everyone agreed that it was very well written. But not a Nobel Prize-winning solution.
So the last resort solution was what they call a spinal stimulator: a little device inserted under the skin of my back and attached to my spine to send electrical impulses to my brain to fool myself into thinking I’m not in pain. OK, whatever, Star Wars for the Back, but I was game.
They did a trial first, inserting the leads into my back and attaching the battery outside my skin. I couldn’t take a shower for five mortal days. I’m obsessed with not having greasy hair, so I must wash it daily. A minor inconvenience.
I woke up the day after the surgery and felt no pain at all. Nancy said she had three tasks to get done by the end of the week, and I sprinted around and did all of them. I was alive, alert, bouncing on my toes. It worked!
So we went ahead with the surgery and had the thing implanted. A bad sign: the minute I woke up from the surgery, my right foot hurt like fuck. I moaned and groaned and warned that I might curse, which the doctor graciously allowed would be OK. It took forever for the foot to calm down. But it never has gone away completely. I have peripheral neuropathy, and it feels like the surgery encouraged it enormously.
There is a legal term, res ipsa loquitur, which means that the thing speaks for itself. You don’t go into surgery without something hurting and come out with excruciating pain without something having happened. Something happened. But I’m not going to sue or anything; stuff happens, after all.
The worse thing is that I’m no better. My back still hurts within ten minutes of standing up and doing anything—in fact it hurts sooner than it did before the surgery. It only doesn’t hurt when I sit or lie down. There’s this nice and very hot young woman who works for the spinal stimulator manufacturer who is very responsive (not like that, you pervs) but just keeps me shifting from one of an endless list of programs to the next, none of which do any good.
When I’m speaking, she interrupts me and continues to talk over me. Now I know how women feel. I apologize on behalf of all manhood. We’re jerks.
So one of the hilariously named “Pain Fellows”--oh how I like that title!--at Virginia Mason suggested I take a four-hour, once a week virtual class on pain management. I could just imagine: lighting candles, thinking positively, and being present in the moment. Stuff my sister was selling in the ’60’s.
I’m no good at that stuff because I don’t handle abstract concepts well at all. Most self-help books leave me thinking, “Wha…???”
But I tuned in, and it has changed my life. No kidding.
The first three classes were, ok, yeah, but the fourth introduced “radical acceptance.” The teacher, a psychologist at Virginia Mason, introduced a metaphor that I had used to describing my relationship to my fiction. She said, Don’t keep banging your head against a brick wall. The wall doesn’t care. You could bang your head against a brick wall all you wanted, but all you would get are bruises and scrapes.
I’d like right now to stop and snicker at the idea of the Pain Fellow suggesting this to me early on. Did he realize that the spinal stimulator wasn’t going to work and he wanted me to go to Plan B beyond the Last Resort? Or did it just occur to him? Oh, those Pain Fellows, what a side-splitting bunch of Fellows they are!
Years ago, Nancy’s nephew earnestly urged me to go back to writing fiction. Annoyed, I told him, “I’ve been banging my head against that brick wall for 30 years, and I’m not going to do it anymore.” (Of course, I’ve gone back to revise that novel.)
But since that last class, maybe two months ago, I’ve had two bad nights. Usually by now I’d have had at least seven or eight nights when I was terribly depressed and a couple when I just wanted to die—I haven’t been suicidal, but I had no interest in continuing to live in this kind of pain.
My brother has had a bad stroke, and they found him lying on the living room floor. They managed to get him to a hospital, then a rehab place, and the care has been either completely negligent or intentionally terrible that he still isn’t home. I told Nancy that if she came upon me lying on the living room floor to please just step around me and go about her business.
I’ve thought back over my life and considered how different it would have been if I’d known about radical acceptance. This is going to sound silly:
I’ve always loved history. My high school formed a special history seminar for especially interested students. They gave a qualifying test. I never passed it. My last year, the question was something infuriatingly stupid like, “If a tree falls in a forest, and nobody hears it…” I don’t know that a question like that even examines an ability to think.
Of course I wasn’t selected. I was so frustrated and upset, I went and confronted the teacher who selected the group and announced, “You won’t have to worry about me again!” (Thereby unknowingly echoing Nixon after losing the California governorship a decade earlier.) I was nearly in tears. He smiled smugly and said, “I never did.”
I remember that 50 years later. Isn’t that sick? That history teacher was a brick wall. What if I’d realized that back then? Would I have reacted so immaturely at being so easily shrugged off?
And oh, all of the brick walls since! My first law firm, all those smug old ex-Navy jerks with their endless needling and complete lack of training. AIG, oh my god, where once I was on the phone and some guy came into my office and started talking to me. How could I have had any impact on that culture of piracy, illegality, and ignorance? And, stupidly, Kate’s basketball and softball coaches and umpires. No one was ever going to get through to those narcissists.
So I shouldn’t have tried so tirelessly and angrily to tear down the walls. I was never anywhere near as powerful as they were.
So maybe, finally, today, a glimmer of hope that I can have a few years of peace, if not painlessness, before I go. Radical acceptance!
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