I got an epidural during labor. For months afterwards I’d get spasms at the injection site, and I literally could not move. The pain would shoot all the way to my finger tips and down to my toes. My friend who had just had a baby was experiencing the same thing.
We thought it was a normal side effect since we both had it, I found out later it isn’t.
Anyway not quite the same thing and last only a few minutes, but it sure hurt like hell and was scary. My biggest fear was I’d be holding my son when it happened.
Once I threw my back out while making the bed. I pulled up the sheet, heard a pop and was instantly overcome with intense pain. I fell on the bed, unfortunately flat on my back; it took me about an hour to be able to get from my back to my side, and about 2 hours until I could get up. Crying from the pain, I had to convince my then-six-year-old that it was NOT a good idea to pull Mommy’s arms to get her to stand up. I was okay by the end of the day.
The pain is excruciating. I could conceivably still move, but the pain was so intense that I – just couldn’t bring myself to move. Slaphead’s description of “the vision-hazing sphincter-unravelling head-spinning bolts of liquid agony shooting from your back to all other parts of the body” with every movement is uncannily accurate.
I learned this the hard way about a month ago; I was drinking a glass of water and it started going down the wrong pipe…manic coughing and sneezing ensued. I bent over the counter. (why do you bend over when you cough/sneeze? Or at least why do I?)
Lower back seized up and didn’t let go for three days.
What irritated me most was the horribly painful sneezing. It’s like my nose decided to go on a sneeze-fest just because it made me yelp with pain every single time.
I have life-long scoliosis, with chronic moderate-level back pain, slowly gradually getting worse over the years.
I’ve never had an all-out event like any described above. But I imagine I’m at high risk for such a thing to happen at any time.
What happens to someone living alone who has this sort of medical emergency, or anything similar? Can you even writhe your way along the floor to the telephone? Or do you just writhe in agony for a week or so until you starve?
People living alone worry about things like that. Same for older people with osteoporosis who fall and break a hip bone. You read stories like, a month later when the rent isn’t paid, the landlord finally comes snooping and finds the victim (dead or nearly so), starved and dehydrated, wallowing in a pool of pee on the floor.
Is this the fate of (older) people living alone?
No. At least, I couldn’t, and I was 36 and strong and healthy.
Pretty much. Or until a neighbor notices he hasn’t seen you and works up the nerve to come check on you. That’s how we found out my grandmother had fallen - several hours later her neighbor noticed her mail hadn’t been taken in, so he came to check on her. Thank goodness she lived in a neighborhood with “nosy” neighbors she socialized with daily.
As well you should. There are a couple of things I’d recommend: develop a routine and stick to it, so those around you notice when it’s broken. (Yes, I know home invasion experts say don’t do this, but at some point a person is at higher risk of medical incident than burglary.) Call the same person daily, just a quick check in, so they know when something might be amiss. Get one of those Life Alert (or another brand) services where you keep a button around your neck or on your wrist that you can press to call emergency services if you need it.
Too often, it is. At least, having to think about this stuff and work out a solution that keeps you safe and connected is.
I was lifting a good old heavy reel to reel tape recorder from the floor to a table, which also involved a turn.
The pain didn’t hit immediately, it just grew and grew.
How can I descrobe the spasms? You know the time when you are puking up uncontrollably, it hurts and you desperately want to stop retching but your body completely defies your will as if it was mocking you - well that’s what back pain spasms are like, only much worse.
You start to realise what a wonderful structure your back is, the fantastic natural cantilever that you never give a single thought about.
When you hurt your back like that, you think about each movement,which muscles are working, and you almost always get it wrong. If your left lower back hurts, then maybe you don’t lean toward it - wrong your back works the other way around, lean to the left and it eases the strain on the left side of you.
When you start moving, you never realise the complex wave of muscle action that travels left and right across you, until you ‘do your back in’, then you find using your left hand to reach up is bad, yet reaching down with the same hand is fine.
If the pain lasts longer than a few days, it also tires you out, you feel greyed out, it affects your mood - you become angry with your body - your mind wants to do stuff, but good old body tells you ‘no’ and in a very robust manner.
It is a very real concern. Late Doper Chique told of this when she became seriously ill - crawled to the bathroom, vomiting, and it was hours before she managed to crawl to the phone and call 911.
My mother-in-law fell in the bathroom in the middle of the night. My father in law isn’t deaf as a post - posts have better hearing than he does when he’s not wearing his hearing aids. So he couldn’t hear her calling for help. In her case, my sister-in-law was visiting; she was sleeping in a different part of the house and finally heard MIL calling.
MIL now wears one of those alert necklaces, a la “I’ve fallen and I can’t get up”.
And let me recommend getting one before the senility/alzheimers kicks in. You need to remember to use it. We would love to get one for my mom, but she wouldn’t know what it is or remember to use it if she did fall. We plan on getting me one in a few years or whenever the roomie moves out. As it is, I don’t go anywhere without my cell phone in pocket. [not just a fall, but in case my heart acts up as well.]
It would be pretty unusual to walk around for years and years with a herniated disk, as opposed to a bulging one.
I’ve done it bad three times. The first I’d just gotton up from a couch and was walking across the room when WHAM, it was like a bolt of electricity coursed through my body. I had to feebly scootch back to the couch, didn’t know if I was having a heart attack or what and even called 911 and talked to the operator. Gradually I could gingerly get up and move but it was nearly a week before I could move somewhat normally again.
The second time I was bent over tying my shoe and when I tried to straighten an excruciating pain shot through my back. I couldn’t make it go away no matter how I positioned myself and just taking a breat shot waves of pain through my body. I missed several days of work and went to a specialist. Turns out a tiny piece of fat or whatever had moved in and lodged between my vertebrae and disk. He’d seen it before, said I would thereafter be more prone to a recurrence and thankfully it disintegrated after a couple more days.
The last time I was trying to lift a huge Italian concrete vase onto the pool edge by myself. It took every bit of strength to get it there and I immediately began to feel like I’d screwed something up bad. It got worse and worse and again for several days I was on the couch in pretty uncomfortable pain.
I get little pulls all the time from yardwork and the like but the big ones are pretty much debilitating. Fortunately I’ve got Flexeril and methacarbomol for the emergencies.
So true!!!
And adding to that; set your cell phone up so that emergency responders can get to your emergency contact(s). My phone (Droid) actually has an emergency contacts tab on the lock screen. I designated 3 entries in my Contacts list (husband and 2 brothers) and I think someone could call them even if the phone is locked.
Other people I know with Android phones don’t have that ability 
. With iPhones the suggestion is to upload a custom lockscreen wallpaper with a phone number visible (edit the graphic file itself). And there are third-party apps, at least for the Android.
That bit of research was prompted by the recent death of a friend. He didn’t have any kind of emergency contacts list on his person, and his phone was locked. Somehow, after about 12 hours, they managed to track down his work phone number (maybe the landlady knew?) and called there. That was how his family found out.