…or at least, it feels that way.
I sort of earned this one. The other day, as I was driving around town, I spotted a bunch of chairs set out for people to take. Well, wouldn’t you know it, the only major piece of furniture the boyfriend and I were missing for the new house was chairs for the diningroom!
So I pulled over. There were several people grabbing up chairs. I sat on the different styles there to see which was the least uncomfortable for me, and then madly dashed about finding 6 of the same style and finish. I ended up carrying them to the car two at a time in order to make sure no one carried them off (which almost happened, twice).
These are not by any means light-weight chairs. They are solid hardwood and heavily built. As far as owning them goes, this is great – probably oak, nice looking, built to last, wonderful. But as far as yours truely carrying them…ugh, that’s a whole other matter.
This was…a most unwise thing to do. You see, my back has been contemplating moving from a state of cold war level tension into open revolt. I’ve got a 10 year history of back injuries, starting with a car accident that didn’t bother anyone else but sent me to three months of physical therapy.
I’ll admit, the whole story on how this was foolish gets worse.
You see, on my way out to the errand that sent me to that part of town, I had checked my mail. And in the mail? My results from an MRI of my lower back…which showed two mildly herniated discs in my lumbar spine.
I read it, but it didn’t really sink in until yesterday evening. Which is about when I really started to feel the impact of my oh-so-clever furniture moving.
I know the herniated discs don’t explain everything that’s wrong, but there’s some level of relief at having an answer as to why my back has been so incredibly bad for the past 6 months. I don’t know, at this point, what we’re going to do about it. I also suspect I have herniated discs in other places – the pain where I now know I have a herniated disc in my lower back is very similar to the pain in the middle of my spine, and at the base of my neck is suspicious as well.
For that matter, I need to have vertical MRIs done to show the curvature and possible subluxations (partial dislocations) in my back.
In people with EDS, it’s not uncommon for joints to slip back into the ‘correct’ alignment if you set it up so that it’s easy for them to. This means that a traditional, horizontal MRI aligns the spine more often than not, and can do the same for shoulders, the sacroiliac joint, and others. So the fact that my horizontal MRIs show my back in good alignment doesn’t necessarily mean much.
Unfortunately, like so many other things in my world, that’s asking for slightly non-traditional treatment. I guess I’ll start that fight once we figure out what we’re doing with the information we already have.
Brilliant Mind Broken Body 