Collections - 20. Chapter 20 -- Backs 'N' Stuff

It’s not close to four AM here, to match the time that you wrote me, and while I’ve been babying my back for twenty-five years-or-so, it’s never gotten so bad, as yours suddenly seems to have, where surgery has become a better option than exercise. Also, I’m not half-reclined in a Lazy Boy, in a family room, with a laptop across my legs as you were. I’m at my home office desk, where I usually write, and we don’t have or need a family room. But other than that, I kind of mirror you as being the only person awake in an otherwise dark and cooling house.

And I’m guessing your back didn’t suddenly get bad, or you didn’t do anything foolish, like trying to lift your neighbor’s car like Superman, so I guess you knew this possibility was eventually coming. If so, at least you were ahead of a couple of other people we know, like Duane, who it snuck up on recently, after what he thought was sciatica, or Jessica, who’s had repeated surgeries over at least the past ten years. I thought they were continued attempts to try to fix an initially botched operation, but Duane – who lately, out of self-interest, has been talking with Jessica a lot about her multiple experiences – recently told me, “No, the repeated surgeries have been to fix new, increasing damage, mostly due to age.” Great to know.

Also, where you have our friend Jack and your other colleague doctors to talk with about spines – and I guess, from what you wrote, that it’s the specialty of one of them – Duane has our mutual friend Marty to coach him through helpful pain medications, though not actually prescribe them, since Marty is licensed in Oregon, and Duane and Lindy now live in North Carolina. I mainly have lawyers as friends and in my family, though there are a couple of heart surgeons, one in-law step removed, and two first cousins who are baby specialists. Not immediately useful, in terms of spines, and I hope not even distantly useful, in terms of the heart surgeons.

But I’m sure something will come up soon enough to introduce me to doctors. Other than that, like you, I think the last time I stayed overnight in a hospital was when I was born. Though I did have my tonsils out, when I was less than six, and I may have spent a night in the hospital then. Almost immediately though, I somehow mixed that memory with one of a visit to what I think was a giant department store that my parents might have taken me to just before we went to the hospital, maybe to distract me. So all I ever remember in connection with losing my tonsils is huge, golden spools of deeply colored thread in a brightly lit, high-ceilinged, enormous white room. Perhaps the spools were parts of Christmas decorations or maybe mild hallucinations as a result of the anesthesia – I guess I could ask you, or Marty, or Jack, or my cousins what might have been used to knock little kids out sixty-five years ago. In any case, it was good.

And that’s pretty much all I can do as an aging, male Scheherazade to distract you from being up and alone at four AM. Though that hour seems to be the start of your day, where sometime around one is my usual bedtime. So I haven’t been trying to sleep, and I wasn’t aimlessly wandering the house before I sat down to write you. Actually, I was out walking one of our dogs, who we didn’t realize was largely nocturnal when we got her – at least, she prefers walking when it’s dark and quiet. I suspect she’ll be the same way in the far smaller and perhaps less crazy city, where we intend to retire, but first, we have to get her there, and her other big quirk is she hates cars.

But the subject is back surgery, not eccentric dogs, so I hope your surgery was successful, and this – like Jessica’s – isn’t the first of many. Also, in terms of your upcoming flying to visit one set of your grandkids, I suspect the TSA is used to older people and implanted metal, or even young athletes or war vets with similar internal accessories, so you probably won’t have to go through too many explanations. You could always have your wife roll you through security in a wheelchair.

Still, it’s great fun, modernity, and I sometimes wonder how my grandmothers and great aunts – the members of our family who lived into their late eighties and early nineties – managed to get by without all these medical advances. Then again, I don’t remember any of them ever flying – they never even learned to drive – and the TSA didn’t exist at the time anyway. So they didn’t have anything to explain. My Aunt Min probably would have just whacked any intrusive TSA agent with the constantly handy black umbrella she used, possibly out of vanity, instead of a cane. But it might have been from loyalty, since her husband, my Uncle Sam – yeah, I always got a kick out of that name, too – was one of the daytime floor supervisors of an umbrella factory.

Reading this should also probably put you quickly to sleep, so it might be something you want to keep as close by as Aunt Min’s umbrella – for the next time you’re unnecessarily awake at four AM. Meanwhile, my hope to you for continued good health.