January 17, 2005 - I fell down the stairs.
Yep, we moved into our new house in Kansas City and then I fell down the stairs last Monday. I suppose it was a combination of dry feet and polyester-carpeted stairs that were the culprit, but whatever the reason, at 6am, fresh out of bed, I slipped at the top of step #3 and fell down the other four steps. I landed square on my back, and it was like three big guys named “Guido” had all decided to hit me with baseball bats at the same time. I literally felt the joints in my back pop out of place and distend between the “bridged” areas of the steps. The pain was indescribably excruciating. I sprawled on the floor at the foot of the stairs and screamed the scream of the dying, since I knew my wife had just stepped into the shower and I wanted to be sure she heard me and came to my assistance. In the first few seconds, I was quite certain I had broken something, and was deathly afraid to move, but I calmed myself as best I could, still shrieking from the pain, and made the conscious effort to move my feet and legs, assuring that I had, at the very least, not severed my spinal column. Breathing was next to impossible, as each breath required a mental choice to inflict additional pain on myself, all the while still wailing with each movement.
My wife, scared out of her wits, still managed to get it together enough to help me move from my fetal position to lay on my back on the cold tile floor while I grasped desperately for air and words. I couldn’t lay there but for a few moments because laying on my back turned out to be more painful than laying on my side, so as the dog and my three children stared, my wife and I manuevered me back to a sideways position from which she assisted me into standing.
Well, sort of. You couldn’t really call it standing. I could straighten up to about a 65-degree angle, but that was all. We managed to get me moving enough to take a VERY brief shower and then rush me to the ER (I begged her to let me clean up, in spite of the pain, because I just couldn’t bear being both naked AND smelly - just me, I guess). After a brief time (the ER here was GREAT), I was given some vicoden for the pain, and then they wheeled me in for eight x-rays or so. They verified I was out of alignment and swollen in places, but there were no fractures or breaks, so they gave me a script for more vicoden and a muscle-relaxant and sent me home to bed-rest for 2 days.
Well, bed-rest didn’t work. The condition of my back was such that I couldn’t lay in the bed on my back, or my side, or any other position. The only thing that brought any relief was my recliner, which I lay in pretty much continuously for the 2 days, and have been sleeping in each night ever since. I managed to pull myself together enough to go to work a partial day Wednesday, and all day Thursday and Friday, but a good portion of that was the medications keeping me going.
Today, however, I finally got some relief. Managed to get into a chiropractor as a new patient and get him to start some treatment. He made lots of very minor finger-point adjustments to a variety of areas (he practices kinesiology - never had a chiro who did that before, but it seems to work), and relief in some of the key areas was practically immediate. There was one physical adjustment to the spine that was momentarily excruciating, which is to be expected, since he was re-locating some dislocated vertebrae between my shoulders, but after I caught my breath I was pleased to find that I could finally take a full breath for the first time in five days. I’m supposed to see him at 1pm tomorrow (a Sunday - this guy really goes the extra mile) to get some additional adjustment, and I’m looking forward to it, especially since I have to fly to California on Monday afternoon and need to be able to lie in a bed before I leave!
I realize this is pretty mundane, but thought I would share, since it’s the first time I’ve been able to get on the Dope in a week…