Chronic Pain

 Seventeenth Monday after Pentecost

Festival of St. Matthew (Color: Red)

Monday is Faith Journey Narrative day. I am blessed to be in no pain at age 75. My pulmonary fibrosis causes shortness of breath and a cough, but no pain until its last stages. Painlessness has not always been my life. In 1966 I got a back injury while playing basketball. For the next several years my back periodically "went out" but would come back to normal in a couple of weeks. In the summer of 1972 I injured it more severely. For the next year I could not sit down without a lot of pain. I spent almost all my time on my back or standing. 

In the evening of August 7, 1973, I twisted the knob to open the door of my apartment. I felt a twinge in my back. By the next morning I was in a more excruciating back pain than ever before. I stayed in bed all day, but it just got worse. I went to student health. The student health doctor examined me for about a minute and said, "Go immediately to the Emergency Room." Unfortunately the neurosurgeon on call at the ER was in an operation with a child who had a depressed skull fracture. It was five hours before he could get to me. He examined me for about two minutes, mostly feeling my left foot and toes. He was Malaysian with a thick accent. He said, "I'm going to operate on you at 6 am tomorrow morning." I said, "No, you're not." He operated on me at 6 am the next morning. In those days we didn't have CT's or MRI's. He made his diagnosis strictly on observation. My left foot had dropped and my toes were paralyzed. 

That night after the diagnosis and before the operation, I was moved from the examining room to a public patient ward. It was a very large room with about 35 beds, all men. All the men were African-American except me. I was given a shot. I think it was morphine. The pain diminished. If I were perfectly still, it was only a dull pain. Perhaps it was the morphine, but at the time I thought it was God. I still do. A wonderful peace came over me. In the midst of what had been the most painful day in my life, I was feeling a presence of God as full as I had ever felt. I felt a oneness with the men in the ward and the nurses. I remember this all as vividly as if it happened last night.

I had had a massive disc rupture at L 4-5. The surgery was basically successful. The wonderful thing about disc surgery is that the horrible pain you feel going into the surgery is completely gone when you wake up from surgery. I did have some minimal nerve damage. The toes on my left foot are paralyzed. It is not anything you would ever know unless I told you. 

My back problems would continue for another 11 years. There would be two more operations (all the surgeries were laminectomies) and several more disc ruptures that healed without surgery. There would also be chiropractors, electric shock therapy, and something called myotherapy, none of which helped at all . All this was happening while I was relatively young, 28-39. One doctor I saw during that time told me that my back was so bad, I shouldn't expect to live past my forties. I haven't had any serious back pain since that last operation on December 31, 1984). 

Thanks be to God.

Faithfully,

Christian