Last Saturday was my 35th birthday. Personally I’m not known to be one who regards this sort of thing very much; in recent years I would much rather have ignored it than anything else. I’d probably feel different if I felt I had accomplished more in my life, but that’s the way it goes. This year, however, was different, not so much on the day itself (although it is 35, which means I’m getting perilously close to middle age) but in what happened 3 days after.
On Tuesday my sciatic nerve decided it was time that it and I should become better acquainted. To those of you who haven’t had the dubious pleasure of being incapacitated in that particular manner, the sciatic nerve is the biggest nerve in your body. It goes down your spine, then splits right around the 4th or 5th spinal vertebra, and then down your legs. It’s a pretty damn important nerve and, like an old car, you never give it much thought until it starts going south on you.
For me that time was yesterday. I went to work feeling good as usual, but then in the early morning I started having back pain. So, I grabbed a better chair from an unused cubicle and made sure I could set it up in a way that any orthopedist would recommend, straight and rigid. The pain kept getting worse as the day went, and started travelling to my butt and down my left leg. That’s when I started remembering my Dad complaining about his back pain back in the day, when he would say that it felt as though his left leg weighed a ton… now Dad had a painful slipped disc that ended up requiring arthroscopic surgery, so I started to worry.
Around 4 I couldn’t keep sitting still anymore so I left work and went to my local clinic. After a two and a half hour wait (it’s true what they say about the Quebec health system…) I ended up seeing a doctor whose opinion was that I had either a lumbar sprain or a slipped disc. I’ll be finding that out in a few days — if it still hurts in a week, then it probably wasn’t a sprain. I didn’t get a prescription for anything good though, just Naproxen. It’s a big pill that contains the equivalent of two and a half Aleves… meh. The label says it might make me feel dizzy; there wasn’t any information on any negative side effects (har har har).
So, for my 35 years, I got bad back pain and big pills that don’t do anything fun. No wonder I ignore my own birthdays — entering old age is scary!