Well it's been quite a past couple weeks. In the last three days of my honeymoon, an "old friend" came to visit and accompanied us back to the U.S.: my lower back. You see, at some point back in 2001 a disc slipped but after about two weeks and a surgical consult, it stopped being a bother. Now fast-forward to 2008. While I was enjoying my first 10 days of married life, the disc decided it wanted to slip some more. Only it did more than slip, it fairly went "on holiday", as they say in the UK.

The picture below is a phone camera snap of the medial plane body line MRI scan I had a mere 5 days ago. I added the red circle. This is pointing out the place the disc (L5-S1) should be. But as you can see, it isn't there. At all. In fact the only way you can see this disc is by an umbilical plane MRI scan (sorry, I didn't snag that one). It looked a lot like what happens when a kid piles on all sorts of stuff onto a hamburger at a picnic and then decides to squish it down to a size he can fit into his mouth. You get the idea.

So, for most of this month I have been using a cane to walk around and taking the kinds of pain killers I

Click the picture for a bigger view
hoped I'd never have to take, at least not until I was drooling on myself and talking to people I haven't seen in over 50 years, who aren't really there. So all I need at this point is a pipe and I'd look a lot like Henry Fonda. Anyway, today I had my first attack pass at this mess. It was an injection of lidocaine and some kind of glucocorticoid steroid (the procedure is discussed here). The short version is this: they stick a really sharp needle into your lower back and pump it full of dye contrast, lidocaine, and the steroid.

That's it. For a 1-minute (or less) procedure, it feels like it's taking an hour. And let me just advise you to do all you can to avoid being in a position in life where you have to pull your pants down and let 5 total strangers get a full and uncensored view of your butt without at least making them buy you a drink first. =) To add to it, they then pump drugs into your back and boot you out the door! It's either a really bad nightmare or a typical party scene at the Playboy Mansion, take your pick.

So, I am told I will know within the next two weeks if this procedure was successful at quelling this recurrence sufficiently or if "further measures" will need to be taken. Fun, fun fun!

I am grateful for this one thing though: I live in a place where I can actually get medical treatment, albeit not without some struggle with my insurance company. [Once I convinced them that I was both sincere in my expressions of discomfort and not looking for a goldbricking excuse, they became a lot more cooperative.] All over the world, people with a problem like this just plain have to live with it. How they do it now, and how they did it back when there wasn't much in the way of health care available, I cannot imagine. The idea of living day in and out with that kind of pain and nearly no way to reduce it is almost unthinkable.

And with that, I think I'll go back to bed. :)