New Dawn, New Day

I was yeeted out of the comfortable map of my life on January 18, 2024.

There had been signs of danger, of course, but I discounted them because they looked like things I had seen before. Nothing had come of them then, so, no big deal now, right?

Let me back up a bit. It all started with a tightness in my neck a couple of months ago. I ignored it. the tightness slid down to hide behind my shoulder blade, where it grew into a dull, ceaseless ache.

I tried hard to ignore that too. After all, I'm fifty-eight years old and a cabinetmaker by trade. I handle all manner of heavy forest products on any given day. Why wouldn't I have some soreness here and there?

The soreness swelled into nerve pain, radiating down my arm. It was getting harder to ignore. Working became beyond uncomfortable, and I'd have to stop every so often and let the pain fade a bit before carrying on. I could get some relief at home, but then it got hard even to sit, or to get a solid night's sleep. The pain had grown too large to shove into a box, but it still wasn't constant...yet. I could find relief by lying down flat on my back, so there was that, at least.

What was I to do? Could I do anything about this? What I usually do, I suppose--rationalize. What else? This was getting problematic, but I have no health insurance, so going to the doctor was not something I felt I could do. After all, I was still mostly functional. Besides, this had happened once before, not quite as severely--and that pain had eventually gotten bored and wandered off on its own. Letting it take care of itself, I thought, would work this time too. It had to.

And it did. Right up until the night of the 18th.

Work that day had been particularly grueling. I'd spent the day gluing nosings onto cabinet decks, and all day long I'd been cranking clamps tight. My entire arm was throbbing and my elbow and forearm in particular felt like they were about to burst. On the way home, I rated the pain at about an eight on that stupid scale of smiley faces doctors use, thinking I knew what pain was. I'm nothing if not grandiose. Eight. Pfff.

Later that night, soon after dinner, I learned about pain. It came bounding in from nowhere on silent predator's paws, battening down on my left arm from shoulder to wrist like fiery claws and teeth were trying to tear the muscles from the bones! It was like nothing I've ever felt and it went on and on and on. It would relent briefly only to attack again, and again. There was no escape.

My wife, despite her scarred, beautiful, warrior's heart, was beside herself. She insisted that we go immediately to the emergency room, but I could not get off the bed. I could not move, except to writhe, groan, and scream a time or two. She wanted to call an ambulance, which is a remarkably un-Deborah-like thing to want, but in between cries I managed to convince her not to. All we had to do, I moaned, was ride it out and the pain would fade.

Yeet.

Morning came, finally, after an endless night. The pain had diminished, but not by much. Making up the difference were shooting waves of prickles, and sometimes they were on fire. It was time to go to the emergency room. That isn't a decision an uninsured person makes lightly; normally, I would not have done it. Now, though...even though I believed they could do nothing for me, that there was no instant relief on the way, no other option existed. I had to go.

The ER was exactly what you would expect if you weren't having an actual emergency, which of course by then, I wasn't. They shot me up with Turadol, which is like jacked-up Tylenol, they explained. They then left me to experience the soothing relief of the shot. It never came. Eventually, somebody came around and whisked me off to have a CT scan, then whooshed me back to my little nook to further enjoy the non-existent relief provided by the vastly overpriced shot. A couple of hours later, the ER doc strolled through and informed me the CT scan revealed some spinal stenosis from getting old. He threw out a diagnosis of cervical radiculopathy--which apparently means that your neck makes your arm hurt--gave me a smidge of gabapentin and a referral to a neurologist, then cut me loose. The gabapentin worked about as well as the Turadol. The entire four-hour outing set me back $3,338.67.

Then, I was home. It was close to noon on a Friday, and in my normal life, I would have been working. So I eased myself into the car and drove the mile to where I worked, a nice little cabinet shop a mile from my house, to talk to my bosses and let them know what had happened. That went well; it would not be until the following Monday morning that I would begin to learn how far I'd been yeeted from my old life into this new and far more uncertain one.