My Aching Back

We hosted a small dinner party last night with some wonderful friends. Company for us means cooking up too much good food, drinking nice wines (plural intended!) and getting the house all cleaned up beforehand.  It's one of my favorite things to do; I love friends, food and wine and the impetus to clean the house is a nice side benefit.

By the time our guests arrived, I was exhausted and in a lot of pain, despite 3x the normal dose of OTC painkillers and a lot of stretching.  I had a wonderful time but I was not at my cheery best.  To our guests and my lovely wife, I hope I wasn't too disappointing; I really was doing my best to smile through it all and you made my evening wonderful despite it all.

I've had back issues for about 12 years now. In a technical sense, I have a herniated disc at L4-L5 and a bulging disc at L5-S1.  Basically that means my lower back is really messed up.  I've managed this pretty well with exercise, physical therapy, pharmaceuticals, spinal injections, care in activity and a stiff upper lip for all of those years.  I buy automobiles based on how good the driver's seat is.  I have a lumbar support on every chair I inhabit on a regular basis and use an inflatable one on airplanes.  I lift with my legs.

(this is not actually my MRI, but you get the idea)

None of this works any more.  And back pain itself isn't the big issue. The herniated disc is sitting on a nerve that travels down my right leg. In the past, this has caused some intermittent pain, to the point of having to use a cane at times to get around. Now and for the past three months, pain is a constant and unwanted companion, ranging from merely bothersome to excruciating -- and trending more and more towards the latter. Picture a knife stuck into the back of your hip. And twisting. And continuing to your toes.

I have a few friends who have chronic pain issues from fibromyalgia, arthritis and the like.  I have a (small) appreciation for what they are going through and they've been a help and an inspiration.  I also know several people that have had spine or neck surgery and they've also been a source of great encouragement and advice.  And it's now time to fix me.

So in late January, I'm going under the knife. I have a superb surgeon who is doing what is now the most conservative option; a partial laminectomy (removal of some bone from my L4 and L5 vertebrae) and removal of the bulging part of the offending disc. There were other options, but this is the one he recommended and the one I chose.  We discussed my MRI and played with a spine model for 30 minutes; it was great and I have full confidence that this is right for me.  He's also a PharmD and we spoke of that for a while too; I have the right guy.

This may not fix me permanently; the other disc is still a potential issue and the herniation could recur there or in the "repaired" disc. But it's a start -- and it's not fusion, which I am not willing to concede to just yet, and my surgeon tells me I do not need. Yet.

This should give me immediate relief after the recovery period and allow me to live again without constant pain and enjoy being a functioning human again; I'm not a fan of being opened up but I can't wait to do this.  I will stay one night in the hospital and then I'll be ambulatory but I won't be able to drive or fly for 2 weeks (this was originally quoted as a month but I appealed to the jury and he admitted that if I get help handling bags and such the 2 weeks was reasonable).  I may stretch it to 3 weeks.

To everyone who has offered me encouragement over the last several months, and sometimes helped me do the things I couldn't do on my own, I can't thank you enough.  This especially goes for my wonderful wife, who has put up for a long time with my inability at times to get things done around the house, my waking up shouting in the middle of the night, and the really foul moods that chronic pain can put me in.  For her especially, I'm hoping that this works.

To my friends: come visit me! If anything is going to kill me, it's going to be the stir-craziness of 2-3 weeks in the house.

Cheers, good fortune and especially good health to all of you for 2012.

What Kind of Friend am I?

It is puzzling to me that many people still refer to a subset of my friends as my "Twitter Friends" because I originally connected (and still interact) with them on the social networking platform Twitter.

I've often said that the beauty of Twitter, and what separates it from Facebook and other platforms, is its simplicity and malleability.  With a limit of 140 characters per message, verbosity (and at times depth) is not easy.  But extensions, clever applications and the imagination and critical mass of the twitterverse makes it a very rich tool for communication - and for community.

This offers a flexibility that allows one to utilize Twitter in a very personal way.  Some people have created a large group of "virtual" friends; others connect with people around the globe that they'd be unlikely to meet otherwise or network with their professional peers.  Some just sit back in the virtual shadows and read the flow of posts. Some communicate with friends that they met outside of social media.  Many, including myself, do all of the above.

As a much-too-frequent business traveler, I originally used Twitter, and followed local Baltimore people, as a way of becoming and staying connected to my community.  What I discovered was a richness of social connection that made me a part of this city that I had never been since I moved here 14 years ago.  I don't just chat online.  Whenever I can, I get out and meet people.  I now count my "Twitter friends" as some of my dearest and closest, and my Twitter and non-Twitter social circles now intersect to a great degree.

So when does "Twitter friend" become just "friend"?  And why the distinction?  Do you have a "bar spouse"? Do you work for a "LinkedIn employer"?  Have a "web dog"?  Dating a "supermarket guy"? Hire a "Google electrician"?

What do my "Twitter friends" and I do?  We chat with each other.  We share and debate the news.  We have parties. We make each other laugh - and sometimes cry.  We share food and wine and all that is good in life.  We have disagreements and drama.  We celebrate our triumphs.  We welcome births.  We grieve deaths.

We embrace.

We embrace each other in the same way as any other friendship.  We are a powerful community of friendship and love and if you define us by how we discovered each other, you are missing the point entirely.  We may have met through a network of machines but our relationships are 100% human.  And these relationships are just as complex and wondrous as any other. More so if anything, since we have so many ways to communicate.

I'd like to wish Happy and Warm Holidays to my wonderful Twitter friends, my lovely Internet wife and of course my adorable web cats.

And if you follow me on Twitter, I'd like you to come out and meet me sometime, so we can be just Friends.  I am a good friend.