Back is achin'; work is never done.

And now I know why my back is achin'...after 18 years. For 18 years, I have lived under a cloud of constant discomfort...the kind of dark cloud that threatens thunderstorms at any moment. The thunderstorms are miserable: periods of debilitating agony sweep me in an instant from innocently bending at my waist - a mere 20 degrees to pick up a dish will do - to lying semi-fetal on the floor, outwardly paralyzed, inwardly writhing, sweat breaking on my brow and color rising to my cheeks as I attempt to psychologically outrun the pain from which there is no hiding. Bruising my spleen did not compare...though it tried hard. Breaking my wrist, my thumb did not compare. As anyone who has broken a limb will tell you, you can mitigate the pain; you can rock back and forth, cradle the limb, find some way to release some of the sensory overload, some way to avoid the full brunt of the messages the nerves want your brain to focus on, some small comfort.

But a spine injury is the perfect storm. Your body knows that any continued motion - yes, even those token palliative ones like swaying or massaging - threatens permanent paralysis, and it makes damn sure that you know it too. The pain of the injury itself pales in comparison to the body's response to a jeopardized spinal cord: every muscle in the area goes into spasm with the sole intent of immobilizing you and keeping you from clumsily rending those precious nerves. The price you pay for this service is temporary paralysis...That, and the full brunt of the gut-wrenching, maddening, blinding pain.

The storms are misery. Still, I would gladly suffer them once a year, say for a week, if that meant that the other 51 weeks would be trouble-free, that the cloud would lift completely and the sun shine unimpeded. Alas, it is not so. The backdrop into which these violent thunderstorms intrude is not an otherwise sunny day; rather, it is a perennially overcast sky.

Since suffering the seminal (self-inflicted) injury when I was 16, I have never been able for one instant to forget my back, and consequently, myself. An act as simple as getting up out of bed every morning requires deliberation: which side am I lying on? How badly is the area inflamed today? Can I do a sit-up, or do I have to roll to my left side, plant my left elbow against the mattress, and use it to wedge myself to a sitting position? On my worst days, I have to inch to the edge of the bed in a fetal position, then allow gravity to pull on my legs while I maintain the fetal position until I slide like a hard-boiled egg into a crouching position on the floor. From there, I can make a foundation of my thighs and cranes of my arms to lift my torso erect and place it onto the safe cradle of my pelvis. Once the torso is propped up vertical, I can walk mostly normally, and as the day progresses, my body loosens, and I can approximate human motion - settling into a chair or standing from one and walking here and there - well enough so that the casual observer wouldn't know that I'm one step away from invalid.

At the time of the seminal injury, I went to the doctor and told him my back hurt, that I was having these episodes. I told him it hurt when I skateboarded; he said, "Stop skateboarding." I asked him, "Will it get better?" He said, "I don't know." Then he threw a pamphlet at me and said, "Do these exercises." I doubt there is any way to explain how hopeless that visit made me feel. I made a feeble attempt to do the exercises, but I often couldn't bend in the places the exercises required, and even so, that "I don't know" reverberated over and over in my head. Eventually, I gave up on the exercises altogether.

In those days, the clouds were thinner. My back was often stiff and tight, and I could always see the dark thunderheads at the horizon, but I still had something like my normal range of motion, albeit in a tentative way. Convinced by the Doctor's words that this pain was something I was going to have to live with, I continued to try to do the only thing that ever brought me pure, unbridled joy: I tried to skateboard. I worked through the pain as much as I could. I learned not to try certain things, as much as I hated that, but even even while trying to be careful, I delivered myself from the clouds to the storm as often as not. The days I was able to skate dropped from 5 a week to 3. Then to 1. Eventually, I stopped trying. During my senior year of high school , what time I didn't spend at school or working, I spent sitting or lying on the couch watching the video that ushered skateboarding in to its golden age, "Shackle Me Not", over and over...watched from the sidelines as my little sport, my private love, exploded.

It's been a hard 18 years. I've watched my mysterious back condition worsen, my range of allowable motion go from "I can bend this way, but it hurts a little" to "I can't bend this way". I watched as a tendency to bend over my left thigh to protect my left lumbar region turned into slight scoliosis. I watched as that slight scoliosis turned into more severe scoliosis that has caused a lowering of my right shoulder, a straightening of my left lumbar, and mysterious muscle pulls behind my right shoulder-blade.

When I noticed sometime in the last two years that I had to squat - unable to bend my waist enough - to lift the toilet seat, I realized that I was facing the very real prospect of a very unpleasant decrepitude in my old age. I saw a chiropractor for the first time. She was surprised at how unresponsive my back was; I was not. When she asked me if I had ever had an MRI, I was surprised to find that I couldn't remember and that I probably never had. Still, I thought, the doctor must have done one when I was 16, and I just can't remember it. Those considerations being moot, we scheduled an MRI for me.

I fully expected the MRI to show nothing special, so accustomed had I become to living with pain of mysterious origins, so I was surprised and somewhat flustered when I saw the words "...chronic changes of stress fracture involving the left lamina of L5 vertebral body". On the one hand, it's a relief to finally know that there is an obvious, explicit cause of my pain. On the other hand, I have to wonder how different the last 18 years could have been if I had had the gumption to get a second opinion. Would a back brace and proper time to heal have allowed me to resume skateboarding boldly, unreservedly? Now that I know the root cause of my problem, can I still address it, or have 18 years of aggravation, added injury, and compensatory poor posture placed my spine beyond repair?

I don't know the answer to any of those questions, but at least I know why I'm in pain. Cold comfort, but then so is the comfort of rocking and cradling a broken limb, and as I well know, that's better than no comfort at all.