The Dirt Field

Bobby rented the movie “Eat Pray Love” for me the other day, and when I saw it on the kitchen counter, I cringed. When the movie was released, I vowed never to see it. The book was excellent (except for the parts about god); not only were Elizabeth Gilbert’s travels fascinating, but I liked her writing style and her internal struggles and unsettled nature were highly relatable. Translating the book into a movie, however, resulted in a nauseating tale of an upper class white American woman escaping from her tortured existence by traveling for a year and cherrypicking other cultures while living off a magical pot of cash. I put on the movie out of obligation, fell asleep before Julia Roberts even made it to Italy, and woke up so annoyed that I froze my laptop in my haste to eject the disc.

The point is that I can recognize that while Gilbert’s existential torment was truly a crisis to her, it seemed a little pathetic and silly when you reduce it to the basic storyline. In other words, the movie made me want to slap her, which is why I’m preparing you in advance: this tale of woe and medical malady pales in comparison to just about anything, including cancer fighters and people who have eaten bad seafood. Nonetheless, it was jarring and frightening and painful to live through and now I need to talk about it before I can move on.

Warning for the squeamish or faint of heart: This story will contain references to pain, profanity, pee, poop, and drugs. If any of these make you uncomfortable, we are probably not friends.

The pain in my lower back (slightly off to the right) started roughly three weeks ago, around the time I began my strength training at the gym. It flared up randomly, occasionally caused searing twinges, and faded in and out. I ignored it.

Last Thursday night, I went to the gym, did my warm up, and started with my three sets of squats. After the first set, I realized the movement was exacerbating the back pain, but I did not stop. I did the next two sets, moved the bar to the floor, and began my first deadlift with 145 pounds, a weight I’d used two nights prior without issue.

Halfway up, my lower back exploded in pain, almost as if something had disconnected violently. I didn’t want to make a scene and crash the bar on the floor, so I dropped it to my knees and then to the floor, before standing and gesturing to Bobby frantically across the room. The first words out of my mouth when he arrived were, “I think I need to go to the hospital,” which is weird to recall now because I hadn’t even thought about that until after it was said.

With one hand on his shoulder for support (he had to ask me to stop digging my fingers in so hard), I refused to let him walk away. I was terrified, partially because the pain was so bad and partially because I knew that pain that bad meant there wasn’t going to be any riding in my immediate future. When he tried to get me to sit down, my legs buckled from the pain in my back. Then the medics came with their stretcher, lifted me onto it, and rolled me out of the gym in a scene that is painfully embarrassing to recall. It turns out I could have saved time and dropped the weights anyway.

Let’s fast forward through the next 24 hours. Ambulance ride, me crying and asking repeatedly if this was a ‘career killer’, painkillers in the ER that barely took the edge off but made my iPod sound amazing, leaving the ER while still having spasms that rendered me sobbing and hyperventilating, being carried into the house and put to bed. Things were rough the next morning, better by midday, and fucking terrible by the evening. The spasms returned violently when I tried crawling (walking was out of the question) to the bathroom, and I got stuck sitting there screaming through spasm after spasm as my mother tried to help me crawl back to the bed.

A flurry of phone calls later, the plan was to go back to the ER, but this time to a better hospital. I wasn’t entirely sold; I wanted to try showering and see how that went first. If I couldn’t function through the spasms, I’d go to the ER. My mom thought the shower was a terrible idea, but I was determined.

I made it as far as being naked, sitting on a towel on the floor of the bathroom, and shrieking in pain before conceding that she could turn the water off and call for an ambulance. It was frightening and humbling to be a grown woman and yet be physically unable to move and left to huddle naked in my mother’s arms because I couldn’t see past the pain. When the medics came, they found me clothed (thanks, Mom) and still lying on the floor in the bathroom doorway. After witnessing a single spasm, they got the okay to hit me with Fentanyl and then life was awesome.

No, seriously, it was. Fentanyl is amazing – conversations I had upon arriving at the ER high out of my mind included reciting “The Night Before Christmas”, offering to lead some caroling, trying to pull my lower lip over my head so I could swallow myself and disappear, and telling my father I was going to tattoo his face on my ass as a sign of gratitude or something.

I was admitted to the hospital after three rounds of heavy painkillers failed to enable me to walk (the head ER doctor’s qualification for admittance) and the rest of the night is a blur. Lots of drugs, very little sleep, the insertion of my first catheter (the thinking being that I would then be able to remain completely motionless and thus allow my back to repair itself), and a lot of faces swimming around me.

Now that I’m trying to piece together the weekend that I spent in the hospital, it’s all a bit fuzzy. The spasms stopped, the MRI was an unending nightmare in which I poured sweat (a side effect of one of my painkillers) and felt disoriented and paralyzed, the food was pretty decent, my mood started sliding downhill rapidly by Sunday, and I did nothing to pass the time except listen to music. I didn’t read, didn’t watch television, didn’t do a single thing and yet I never felt bored. While I was awake and talking, I think all of the drugs (Fentanyl, Dilaudid, Percocet, Valium, Toradol, the list goes on and on) had me unconsciously delirious. If I spoke to you over the weekend, chances are that I don’t remember what was discussed or even that we spoke at all.

The catheter was removed on Saturday night so as to prevent infection. A physical therapist came to help me start walking again using a walker and we made it a whopping fifteen feet before I apparently turned white, started to sway and faint, and needed to sit down immediately. While I found ways to get up to pee after that experience, I remember at one point having to call for help because everything was foggy and painful and dizzying. I can’t say if it was the back pain, the drugs, or both that made everything feel so out of control.

Two other things happened while I was in the hospital. One, I started getting a sore throat and the general feeling of having a cold, which was tolerable but made things even more uncomfortable. Second, a primary side effect of many of my drugs was constipation. The nurses gave me all sorts of remedies – more drugs, warm prune juice, milk of magnesia – and nothing helped. I didn’t feel physically bad (at least not that I can recall), but I knew things were reaching a critical point by Sunday afternoon. In what felt like one of the most desperately pathetic moments of my life, I accepted an enema kit from my nurse, insisted on doing it myself, and hobbled into the bathroom with my walker to suffer through ten minutes of my life I want to permanently erase. It’s amazing how quickly pain, fear, and desperation allow you to leap over hurdles you never thought you’d cross, hurdles that included being completely unaware of my own nudity, accepting a catheter, willingly receiving three IVs in 24 hours, being showered by another person, and performing an enema when I could barely support my own weight.

By Monday evening, all tests pointed to a strictly muscular injury, I was somewhat mobile, and sufficiently able to perform bodily and necessary life functions. The nurse wheeled me out of the hospital and into Bobby’s car, and that was it. I was all better, except for the part where my head is still foggy in fits, my back is swollen to the point where there is no curvature, and I cannot walk or sit for long periods of time.

On Tuesday, I got on the trainer for 15 minutes and spun in the granny gear while crying with relief at how good, and yet how bad, it felt. On Wednesday, I rode in the middle ring lightly for an hour, and then again a bit harder yesterday. Riding doesn’t seem to make it worse; then again, I’m also not seeing any reduction in swelling or feeling a decrease in pain. Ice or heating pad, lying down or riding a bike, on my pills or not, I seem to be in an unchanged state that is both scary in its lack of improvement and comforting in knowing that I can at least pedal.

In comparison to people like my brave, cancer-fighting friend Arne or the amazing Tara Llanes, suffering a muscular back injury from which I will fully recover in a reasonable amount of time is a small deal that I should be able to swallow easily. And yet it has been anything but. For starters, the spasms redefined pain as I knew it – it felt like I should have gotten a baby out of all of that agony, agony so blinding and intense that screaming was not optional. I’ve also realized how integral the physicality of riding and training is to my mental stability and everyday life. When faced with the fear of losing that ability, I nearly collapsed, am still trying not to collapse as I get by on tiny spurts of only light exercise. It amazes me that I can be so determined and strong about some things, and yet so weak about others. Arne takes his cancer and treatments in stride; I am a mess over a back injury.

It will get better. I will heal, ride again, get hurt again, etc. and will probably not even need to visit an ashram and write a bestselling novel to get back to my previous state. But something feels different now – I have this weird blurry stretch of days in my mind that were the closest I can ever recall coming to living hell. Examining them closely makes me cringe at the things I felt, the loss of control, the pain, the sheer insanity of being so high, the indignity of being invalid and dependent and forced to scientifically discuss and address my bodily functions with a dozen strangers.

During a Percocet/Valium-fueled high last Friday, I had Bobby make me an appointment for this Sunday with his tattoo artist. That’s just two days away and while I still haven’t decided exactly what I’m getting or where it’s going to go, I’m certain this is something I want to do. It feels like I need some permanent mark as a reminder of how much I love cycling, how much pain one person can stomach, how in the shittiest moments of this experience, all that mattered was getting my body back to being mine, in control and ready to ride.