Slightly Off the Mark

 Let's talk about pain.

Young people tend to be reckless because they haven't experienced real pain. There was a time when, one a scale of one to ten, I would have rated my chronic back pain as a nine, but I'm old(er) now. Chronic back pain is a four. A pulled back muscle is a nine, as is a migraine. A kidney stone is a fourteen out of ten.

I've talked to people who suffered through both a kidney stone and childbirth (not at the same time--wow), and it appears childbirth is a fifteen out of ten.

And there you have it: Older people need a whole new rating system.

 When you get old(er), you realize why older people didn't want to do stuff back when you were a kid. You could find out the same thing by just listening to their conversations:

"My knee says it's going to rain."

"Really? I can't feel my knee because of the lumbago."

"Oh, I haven't been able to lumbago since I was twenty."

"That's limbogo, moron."

Enjoy it while you can, kids.

(By the way, I Googled "lumbago" to make sure I got it right, and found out ... I got it.)

I told you all this to explain how I injured my neck by--wait for it--turning.

I once fell all the way down a set of stairs inside a house that was on fire, and all I got was a skinned knee. The next day I danced the lumbago.

We got a new radio system at work, and because I wasn't familiar with it I turned my head a lot more than usual to make sure of what I was doing. There are seven screens at my dispatch console. You have to be an owl to see everything.

"As long as I pay, my chiropractor doesn't give a hoot."

Neck pain level, after ibuprofen: maybe six, as long as I didn't actually turn my head. But I'd forget--and turn my head.

The neck pain caused head pain, and I was down for about a day. The day after, my wife and I decided to move furniture. This was a coincidence, but also related to pain: The dog's.

Beowulf is around fifteen years old, which in human years is something like 90. So he has trouble getting up and down stairs, but when that's where we are, that's where he'll be. The obvious solution: Move our bedroom downstairs, to where our office used to be. Let's face it, I do most of my writing work on the couch, while icing down various body parts.

My bed hasn't been moved in fifteen years. Why? Because, although we now use air mattresses, the frame is designed for a California King waterbed. Picture something the size of an aircraft carrier, strong enough to hold the contents of Lake Michigan.

It took two hours just to take it apart. Then we had to make multiple trips carrying pieces up and down  those narrow 1879 stairs with the sharp turn at the bottom, and now I know why the dog kept wiping out.

But we did it, and I once again got to dance the lumbago. When it comes to pain, how high can you go? Also, I can now tell you exactly what muscles are needed to haul something up and down stairways. The first day the pain level was about nine, but only when I moved, and as I write this it's down to a much more manageable seven. Ice is my friend.

And that's why none of you have seen me all week. Or Emily. Or Beowulf, who managed to slip by my makeshift barrier and come upstairs to see why we were cursing and throwing things during deconstruction. The next day Emily worked on one of our book projects, while I worked on a different one, and you know what they had in common?

They could be done without moving.

The lesson? I dunno. Buy our books, so we can hire movers? Meanwhile, if you see an older person who isn't moving very fast, cut them a break: You don't know if their day involved a screen, a dog, or a bed.

"A Walk? Nah, I'll just wait in the car."

(Note: I just spent another weekend going through this all over again. It's a good thing I wrote this blog before that, because I've lost all sense of humor since then.) 

There came a certain point the other day, when I dropped to the ground in exhaustion and told my wife, "I don't think I can do this."

Get your mind out of the gutter. Or maybe not, since I'm talking about routing out a sewer line.

You may call it a sewer snake, or a router, or go with the trademarked Roto Rooter, but any way you look at it, it's a crap job. Despite my well-known lack of mechanical ability, I've used routers numerous times, back when roots were growing in my sewer. (By the way, the stuff you flush down that's called "root killer" is really, I suspect, root fertilizer.) But several years ago a true professional came in, put a giant trench in my back yard, and replaced the old ceramic sewer line with brand new, professional grade plastic. I've had no problem since.

Until last weekend.

And it always happens on a weekend, in order to maximize your troubles. Emily and I were preparing for an author appearance, and I headed to the basement for a folding table. There it was: two pools of water over the lowermost drains.

Indoor swimming pools are only fun if you can control what kind of water goes with them.

Ah, but now the good news: While replacing the line, the pro guy put in something called a cleanout, and its purpose is to give you a place to put in the snake/router/out-of-control-metal-tentacle-monster if you need to clear a blockage.

The router I rented weighed six thousand pounds, but it was way easier using it outside than trying to work it through a drain in the basement. I put fifty feet of writhing, hand-smashing sewer snake into the line. It did absolutely nothing.

Which is pretty much standard with my home maintenance jobs.

So, Emily and I hoisted the whole 6,000 pound unit down the outside stairs to the basement where, no matter how much I tried, the snake wouldn't fit into the hole. ("That's what he said." I know you're thinking it.) Then we hoisted the whole 6,000 pound unit back up the basement stairs and into the back of our SUV.

Have you ever heard a car scream? It's not pretty.

But the place I rented it from (Doc's Hardware, downtown Albion), traded me a smaller unit for no extra charge. That one, with maybe a bit of effort, did go into the basement drain. After about twenty-five feet of pretending I was my house's doctor giving it a colonoscopy (now it knows how I feel), the router bit came out with a substantial amount of yuck clinging to it.

It sounds so much easier than it was. I'm not just talking about the pushing and pulling, and the invention of new curse words. To get the router bit in I had to lay on the floor, stick my hand into the drain, and physically force it around a bend in the pipe. Yeah. You know what was in that drain? Yes. Yes it was.

This is why, during our after action review, Emily poured two gallons of peroxide and then three gallons of alcohol on my hand. You see, so much skin had been skinned (thus the term) that, had it been broken (as at one point I thought it had), the doctors could have examined my bones without doing x-rays. Emily was, quite rightly, concerned about infection. (I mean, we do know where it's been.) She was also rightly concerned about the neighbors calling 911 after all the screaming, but I suppose they're used to me by now.

I felt like I was victim #3 on an episode of Game of Thrones.

(Note: We need to buy more peroxide and alcohol, and maybe drinking alcohol, too.)

I don't remember at what point I told Emily that I wasn't sure I could do this. It was fairly early in the process, and I think it has a lot to do with the fact that I'm in my fifties, and last time I routed a sewer line I was in my forties. I don't feel any different--except for when I try something like this.

But we did do it, and it took less than twenty-four hours. (Note: The first time.) As of this moment, only two days later, I can flex my hand again, the scrape on my abdomen has stopped oozing, and I can use my arms as long as I don't lift them over the level of the scrape on my abdomen.

I'm going to call that a win.

 It really wasn't that bad, see?

(Note: This was written before I pulled a back muscle at the beginning of a recent vacation week, leading to several days curled on the couch in a fetal position. That and my annual winter sickness are all unrelated, unless you count them toward proof that, at some point, I unknowingly broke a mirror.

---------------------------------------------------------- 

All I wanted to do was pee.

When you get to be middle aged, that kind of thing becomes very important. Some people wake up at night thinking, "Did I leave the oven on?" or "Will my career ever take off?" or "Did I hear a clown in the closet?" Men over fifty wake up thinking, "Great, my bladder is full. Again."

This can be dangerous, especially if you're in that deep sleep mode. Luckily I've worked third shift for years, and gained experience in ... well, let's call it "sleep-pee". Sleep-pee people can do what I've done hundreds of times: Get out of bed, navigate the stairs, go to the bathroom, climb back up, and get into bed again, all without really waking up. It's ingrained, like a kidney stone.

But sometimes mindless habit can get you into trouble.

I was particularly sleep-pee this time, but somehow managed to make it downstairs. Yes, I hit the toilet: Despite my incompetence at sports, this is one area where I have good aim. I made it back up the stairs, or so I assume, since I really don't remember--but chances are I didn't climb up the side of the house and go through a window.

Now, my bed has been in the same spot for over twenty years. It's an air mattress, but it's set inside a frame made to hold the weight of a waterbed. The side board is very, very solid.

Sometimes I forget that.

What happened next, I'll never know for sure. Maybe my balance was effected by the sinus  medication I'd been taking. Maybe I was just more asleep then usual, even for me. Maybe the dog was on the floor, and I unconsciously tried to maneuver around him. He does that.

Whatever it was, I didn't just climb into bed. Instead I drew back my right foot and slammed it forward, like Charlie Brown trying to kick that elusive football. My sleep-pee brain apparently thought I was two feet further from the bed than I was.

This, incidentally, was my right foot. Arthritis showed up there a few years ago, and my right big toe is already in pain more often than not.

This new pain was not addition: It was multiplication.

The kind of pain that comes from an attempted karate kick by someone with no knowledge of martial arts.

And my toenail ... well, you don't need to know all the details.

Emily was sound asleep, having not developed a middle-aged bladder. As I crumpled over onto the bed, I heard her murmur, "That sounds like it hurt--are you okay?"

I tried to answer, but from face down on the pillow could only make a high, wheezing sound. After about twenty minutes I was able to roll over, by which time she'd gone right back to sleep and only vaguely remembered hearing a noise.

The dog came to check on me, but didn't volunteer to help.

The next day, after seeing the black and blueness of my sleep-pee slip, I did an inventory. In addition to my foot, I'd put my hip out and pulled my lower back muscles. (Say--come to think of it, maybe there was a delayed relation.) My left shoulder and upper arm ached, probably because of windmilling on my way down. I could walk, kind of, while making a little whining sound, but I didn't really want to.

And then I healed. Okay, I'm fast forwarding, but there was some prescription pain medicine in the cabinet and, as a result, I don't remember some of the healing process.

All because my bladder was full. Again.

I know you're looking for some kind of moral to this story, but all I have is "get a bedroom on the same floor as the bathroom"--and even that didn't help me here. I suppose I could also advise you not to be middle aged.

But it beats the alternative.