So today, May 6th of 2010, I pinched a nerve in my back/neck. I've done it before but never to this extent. I had been feeling strange for about 10 minutes, like I had a muscle cramp in my back. I asked Dano to rub it and leaned forward. Immediately upon doing so, I felt like something inside my nervous system had literally exploded. My eyes saw only colors and I think I cried out because Lilah started screaming and Dano said, "Babe, you're scaring the baby," and all I could say was, "Don't touch me. Don't anybody touch me." He took the baby and I stood up hoping to relieve the pain positionally with no luck. I sat in the rocking chair and it kept growing until I thought I'd die. The pain was radiating to my neck, the crown of my head, my right shoulder, my right hip. Everything tingled and I clamped my jaw shut and forced myself to breathe short, shallow, controlled breaths. Lilah was still crying and staring at me and I just told her I was sorry in my head. I was frantic with pain at this point and maneuvered myself onto the living room rug and laid flat on my back, spine aligned. My head was spinning even though I was still and flat. My whole body tingled and all I could think was, "I have to go to work. I have to leave in two hours." Dano sounded light-years away when he said, "You're not going anywhere. You can't even move. Your job requires lifting! How can you take care of others if you can't take care of yourself?" He was right. I knew he was right. But I couldn't even process it at that point. "I'm sorry." "You don't have anything to be sorry for."
He fed Lilah her lunch and I whiled away the minutes on the floor attempting to call Bekah for more nursing advice to see if I'd missed anything. She suggested different ways to position my affected arm and side to reduce the nerve compression. Her ideas helped. I felt my phone continuing to vibrate next to me after I hung up. I knew it was Mike texting me and was again furious for making myself unavailable to yet another person who might need me. Patients, friends, Lilah, Dano, coworkers. The pain tingled and throbbed with the feelings of inadequacy. "I'm broken. I have a problem," I thought. "I'm have the mental incapability to be selfish. I'm crazy." Dano left to run to CVS and buy me copious amounts of Icy Hot and Ibuprofen. I laid on the floor, alone with my brain. She's my arch-nemesis. It hurt to breathe deeply, and the hurt was exacerbated by worry, which was my primary mode of thinking. I looked toward my phone, which buzzed merrily again. "You have a text message. Hope nobody's dying in a fiery crash because you can't answer your phone." Thought #1: I'm a horrible person! What if my phone is right?! Thought #2: I am certifiably bat-shit crazy. And my phone didn't tell me anything. No one is dying. Mike is probably just bored of Bekah's checking in again. Thought #3: Could my phone be the devil? Or worse, 10-Speed (the demonic bicycle of the Coheed and Cambria's Amory Wars graphic novels) reincarnated? I came back to Thought #2. I'm not normally incoherently insane. I really was in enough pain to make me delusional. My thoughts then meandered to the origin of the phrase "bat-shit crazy", one I am oh-so-fond of (incidentally, aerosol-transmitted rabies has been known to occur in caves with high numbers of, you guessed it, bats. Thanks Google). I stared at the ceiling. It appeared to be moving in weird white swirls, so I looked away. I closed my eyes and went through my yogic mudras. I even visualized the nerve cluster that was currently ruining my life and pictured the pain ebbing away like the tide going out and that actually helped considerably. I opened my eyes when the pain was manageable and watched a muscle group from my obliques to my right hip spasm and ripple. It looked too cool to be alarmed. My mind then wandered to wishing for Valium to relax said spasms. "Yeah, at this point, I'd risk my nursing license for it." I started shivering because for some reason my body was struggling to maintain my core body temp. "It's like my nervous system's giving me the finger today," I lamented to the cat who stared back unblinkingly and (I felt) unsympathetically. I spent 5 minutes (I clocked it) rolling from my back to my stomach before realizing I liked it better on my back but could now not get back there. I started feeling tingly and crawly and was convinced there were bugs crawling on me. To make matters worse, a lone ant tracked across the floor about 16 inches from my head. I was on the verge of screaming. Dano came back. He put Icy Hot on the affected areas, killed the offending ant, assisted me off my stomach (which took 10 minutes and I still ended up almost passing out from the pain), helped me swallow 5 Ibuprofen tabs (he only bought 200mg tabs!) and answered my question with no, he didn't believe he knew anyone from whom he could score illegal Valium or Vicodin.
Currently I am resting on the couch on my back. I can't move anything but my hands, so my laptop is resting on my legs and my phone is on my chest. Dano is cooking me a pizza and Mike is texting me his usual endearing craziness and I'm actually able to respond at this point. No one died in a fiery crash, and I have exactly 15 minutes to be at work. I don't think I'm going to make it. Oh well.
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