Up until the end of my fifth decade, I had only suffered two acute back aches. Fives years ago, after carrying mail for thirty years with Canada Post, I had a third. A more accurate description would be a total back spasm accompanied by cataclysmic pain in the lumbar region.
I was highly perplexed and thoroughly distressed. In the first instance, I was twelve years old. After a hard tackle in a game of backyard football, a pinched nerve rendered me unable to stand up straight for about an hour. The second time, I was in my twenties and working as a gas-fitter. My job entailed hauling water-tanks, boilers and furnaces up and down stairs. In both earlier cases, the causes of my injuries were obvious.
Recently, I was at my letter-carrier job and I bent down to pick up a fallen letter. Something invisible stabbed into my spine and all the muscles and connective tissue in my lower back turned to frozen rawhide. It hurt to breath and was equally agonizing to stand, sit or move. I gripped the edge of my maple desk in order to straighten up, while eyeing the young fellow to my left, making sure that he hadn't noticed.
Not having recently fallen, stumbled or slipped, I was completely baffled as to why it was happening. Waves of pain rolled up from my tailbone and refractory pains shot down both hamstrings to my socks. I quickly lost my appetite and felt deeply sea-sick for a week. I accidentally discovered that I could breathe out deeply and accomplish a slight bend in the waist that was impossible if I held my breath.
I worked for two days in that condition and lay like a corpse on my living room floor all weekend, as it proved to be the only position in which I could barely tolerate the pain. I worked another two days and then had two days off for Christmas holidays. I ingested the first muscle relaxant medication that I had ever used and I can truthfully tell you that it made no impact whatsoever. I lay in boiling hot baths to no avail. When walking my postal route with a fifty pound load, my body produced enough endorphins to make my pain tolerable.
During my stints at home, laying flat on my back, I saw millions of still images play at hyper speed through my mind’s eye. Images from my past paraded like photographs in a high-speed slideshow and I felt a physical electrical sensation as if something was being flushed and then re-wired inside my brain. It was similar to deleting a million old JPEG files, uninstalling a half-dozen programs, cleaning the registry of a computer and conducting a defragmentation of the hard drive.
As I stared at our textured ceiling, unavoidably musing on this strange set of happenings, I remembered that my stomach had been acting very out of the ordinary for several years prior to this new malaise. I had always been able to eat anything that couldn't run faster than me and to digest my food with the nonchalance of a sea-gull. Those powers had evidently deserted me and as a consequence, I was for the first time in my life, eating like a careful sparrow instead of a healthy wolf.
I came to the eventual conclusion that my new back ailment was not due to a specific physical injury. I came to know that it had a spiritual/psychological component and that it was actually a good sign that it was happening. Manifestation had started in the stomach to prepare me for worst.
I learned long ago that life is governed by pure efficiency. In the case of humans, particularly because of the artificial lifestyle we lead in our modern world, our bodies must suppress certain functions in order to give more energy to other functions that our physical intelligence deems worthy of taking precedence by their overall importance.
The first item on anyone’s natural necessity list is the Hunt. Gathering that which is needed to sustain the provider and his or her family and/or social unit. In Hunting Mode, preference is given to certain of the hormones and energy is given to the muscles to do physical work. Pain and discomfort are suppressed, as is some of the healing and repair work that will be needed for injuries that one has already sustained.
In my more natural theoretical human environment, the relatively short adrenaline-fuelled pursuit portion of a Hunting Day, yielded more down time during which the body intelligence could switch gears and do some repairs before the next high tension episode. During the repair work, extra blood is sent to the injury site and nutrients are exchanged for dead cells, which are carried away.
The physical increase in the size of the blood vessels triggers millions of nerve endings and their pain receptors. Naturally, this would occur when the body that was being repaired was asleep or at rest, and so go unnoticed. Light activity during the peaceful days before the next Hunt or Fight would serve to keep tissues supplied with oxygen and also stretch new tissue to keep it supple and to preserve range of motion. In our modern workaday world of constant ambient stress, our natural repair mechanism is only possible for perfectly well-regimented, self-disciplined individuals.
I received some e-mails from a friend during the period in which I was experiencing my acute new pains and they contained links to the videos of a Vancouver doctor who had written several books and was also conducting a series of lectures outlining his controversial theories about the nature of illness and addictions. I watched a couple of the lectures and found that I had come to many of the same conclusions as he had. I also gleaned new insight into the brain development of stressed infants and children. I and my sisters had certainly been stressed as children and as infants. I found new hope in the re-wiring of my own brain and nervous system away from stress, negativity and fear into a relaxed, positive acceptance.
This perfect concatenation of serendipitous events led me to thank my Creator for allowing the healing of certain injuries (both physical and emotional), that were sustained in my past, to proceed at that time. During my horrible back pain episode, I typed up my notice of retirement from Canada Post, where I had toiled more than half of my life. I believe that the effect of seeing the light at the end of that tunnel; I. E., slackening the stress of a Thirty Year Hunt, shifted my body into a natural repair mode for the first time in decades.
Though I bear more invisible scars than I do physical ones, three decades of delivering mail on foot in an urban environment, placed great wear on many parts of my physical body. It is a rule of life that anything that hurts going in is likely to hurt coming out. That fact is why I can see my pain in a more proper light. A far worse scenario to contemplate, would be one in which I were not feeling it. Being unaware that injuries lurking within are destroying and limiting one from the deep shadows of the unconscious, is not an option with any possible positive outcome that I can see.
I do not write unconsciously, but I also do not plan ahead what I will write. I simply go to a keyboard when I feel I must and start writing what comes, like pouring water out of a pitcher. I wrote two true stories while still in the talons of my neuralgia and I was surprised at their highly emotional topics, when I read them later. When I finished editing and posting those two stories, Tiny Gulps Of Air and A Parley With Something Other, I suddenly felt as limber as an inch-worm.
[Editor’s Note: Since this essay was first written, I learned that I have a blocked artery behind my knee. With a daily aspirin and a cholesterol busting drug, I exercise through the pain, while my body grows more collateral arteries. I was blessed with the successful cessation of tobacco use after forty-five years of chain smoking Drum. I also learned from a sibling that a branch of my family carries an inherent problem to do with serotonin balances, so I began a low dose ameliorative drug therapy coupled with mindfulness training. I feel blessed to have reached a point that I allow myself to trust these helpful medicines. I still feel the effects of my inherited condition, but after a lifetime of wrestling with it, I now know the cause and thus, my anxiety is reduced in intensity. Mindfulness training has given me positive coping tools that I never possessed before to smooth out the bumps.]
Masking over pain or denying its existence are equally futile non-solutions, in my view. If you ever find yourself shaking like an aspen in a strong North wind and you simply don’t know why, keep shaking friend, look up to the sky and say thanks, because it is highly likely that some old injury; either mental, physical or spiritual is finally being tended to in the natural way. This discomfort may lead you to the right doctor with the right cure for you, be it mental, physical, spiritual, genetic or a combination of all of these interconnected modes. You might call it, the New Natural.
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