Aging, Part 2

The drugs are kicking in but even an open MRI is no walk in the park. Imagine lying on your back with an Oreo 7 feet across lowered over your body to within 2 inches of your nose, with the top of your head only a few inches from the edge of the Oreo so you can see out if you roll your eyes way back. They let you have your arms out to the side so you can grab the end and haul your sorry butt out if the feces hits the oscillator (and isn’t that what claustrophobia is all about, loss of control?). This MRI takes an hour, rather than twenty minutes back in the torpedo tube in a trailer, but the extra time is totally worth it. The flat surface is almost too close to focus on, so I make a game of unfocusing my eyes and consciously hallucinating the Oreo a few feet away. Thanks, Ativan!

All things considered it’s been a hell of a day. The tech yells, “We’re done!” and I roll out from under the Oreo. It only takes a few minutes to develop the films, and the prognosis is in. I apparently have a cyst between Lumbar vertebrae 4 and 5 on the left side. “What, like a spinal zit?” I ask the doc, but just has a blank look. I get an Rx for Vicodin and a course of steroids, and we’re off for home and our guests. An appointment with the Neurosurgeon is scheduled for the next week, and home we go.

Good news. The pain has really been intense, but the morning after the first fistful of steroids, I’m relatively pain-free. The night before, the pain meds had taken the edge off, so I stop taking them to see what I really feel like. Not bad, just a lower backache, a calf that feels like it wants to cramp and a foot shot full of Novocain. After the last week and a half, not bad. We’re having a nice weekend, and other than a limp, I’m feeling pretty good. Next we get to meet the Neurosurgeon down in Scarborough, just south of Portland.

After a 4 second (really!) wait in the not really a waiting room, Doogie Howser greets me in his office. If my ability to read Latin numerals hasn’t failed me, he graduated from Yale in 1990, so he has to be nearly 40, but I have him pegged at 14. Very intense, very professional, I get an uninterrupted half hour with the guy. When was the last time the medical profession spent that sort of time on me outside of surgery, psychiatry or a heart attack scare? I think it was during childbirth, but my memory gets fuzzy somewhere around 1960.

Anyway, he peers at the films through coke bottle lenses, and hems and haws for quite a while. Turns out I don’t have a cyst, but a herniated disk, lumbar 5, left. He leads me through a short tutorial on reading an MRI, disks and hernias, and the “crab meat like substance” that leaks from the former and into a space the nerve would rather have to itself. “Ninety five percent of the time, we can surgically fix this and avoid permanent weakness in the foot, intense pain and eventual incontinence and loss of bladder control.”

At this very second, I want to whip out a credit card, heave it to him and schedule an OR. Then he goes into detail.

“We just roll you over on your tummy (sic), wash you down with antiseptic, slice a neat slit through the back muscle, drill a hole into the vertebrae and tease (sic) out that little piece of crabmeat (sic).” Tummy, tease and crabmeat are his actual words. I swear.

Mentally, the credit card goes back into the wallet, the OR is unscheduled, and I’m thinking homeopathy, a leg brace, chanting, a Shaman, anything but that.

“There is also a one or two percent chance that there’s an infection. Then we’d have to open you back up, wash it out, sew you up and strap a pump of antibiotics to you for ten to twelve weeks.”

As mentioned before, medically I’m an idiot, whereas Liz thinks all doctors are (and she’s the one with decades in the industry). I may be ignorant, but even I know enough to never ask a barber if I need a haircut. It’s obvious that this guy wants to cut, because that’s what surgeons do. For once, facing a doctor I remember to challenge him or at least ask questions. Just taking him at face value, and being a sheep, I’d be in surgery tomorrow. The implication is that otherwise, I’ll be a pain-ridden incontinent Depends wearing gimp from here on out.

“I do forty or so of these every month” he cheerfully throws in.

“How often does this clear up on its’ own?” I ask.

“Plenty of times. It often just clears itself up.” No statistics are offered, but later I’ll look up the website of Johns Hopkins Medical School which puts the odds of this condition clearing up without surgery at better than 90%.

“How long can I wait to see if it fixes itself?”

“Usually four to six weeks after onset.”

“That gives me two to four weeks.

He nods, and hides his disappointment well. Maybe later, Sweeny Todd.

Now I’ve got a few weeks to read up on this and figure out what way to go. There’s an interesting moral dilemma in deciding whether to take the pain meds and feel better or be in pain but know if it’s getting better. Surprisingly, I rarely go for the meds and prefer to feel how I’m feeling. In fact, it’s been a week and the label says, “Take one every six hours as needed” and I’ve only had two. Not masochism, it’s just that this feels like a growing old moment I somehow need to fully experience.

Through damn near half a century, I’ve been car wrecked, capsized, cut up, beaten up and even thrown through the windshield of a taxi. It’s really been a hell of a ride, but all I ever picked up before were a bunch of very interesting scars, or tattoos with better stories, as I like to think of them and a few fake teeth. They are just marks on an aging, wrinkling wrapper that’s been with me for so long, and the changes so slow that it can be unnoticeable. Seeing someone after years or decades makes you notice, but it’s a long slow change, so it’s easier to handle. This disk injury thing isn’t like that. Maybe I’ve just been way too fortunate, but the idea of a permanent and sudden loss of strength or usage of a limb is too sudden and too permanent.

It reminds me of my last flying lesson, when I learned about “stalling”, the fact that there is a speed at which an airplane is aerodynamically indistinguishable from a rock. I remember rumbling along 1000 feet over the New Hampshire shore throttling back further and further at the instructors command, when suddenly at around 70 mph, we pointed straight for the ground. No gradual loss of lift, I was suddenly flying a rock. Obviously I pulled out of it, but that was it for flying lessons. I leave it to the professionals.

It’s the same with my back. Injuries are just supposed to leave scars, and I managed to believe I would always be 20 years old, except with very gradually decaying powers. I was fine with that. But faced with the suddenness of a real loss of function, loss of lift is sort of sobering. James Taylor wisely wrote that the secret of life is enjoying the passing of time. I really try to live that way, to a degree that can drive Liz crazy.

“Do you realize I’m closer to age 80 than 18?”

“Shut up!”

“When Genevieve graduates from college, I’ll be 71.”

“Please shut up now.”

“Your Dad was your age when I met you.”

(Sound of impact from item thrown at head.) “Ouch.”

It seems important to be aware of where we stand in life and not let it slip past unawares. My nightmare scenario has been the same for decades; waking up old and unhappy and unloved and having left not a scratch on the world, wondering where the hell my life went and what it was all about. Much of my time and thought ever since have been focused on preventing that from happening. I can’t do anything about the getting old part, but I hope I’ve got a pretty good handle on the rest of it.