The Chair, The Basin, And The Leg That Wouldn't Let Me Work

Twenty-two years standing up

I have been cutting hair since I was seventeen. I did my training above a chemist on the Ballymount side, sweeping other people's clippings off the floor and making tea for women who wanted to talk about their sons, and by the time I was twenty I had my own chair. These days I work in a busy salon just off the Monastery Road in Clondalkin, the kind of place where the door never really stops going and the kettle is on from the minute we open. On a Saturday I might do fourteen heads. Colours, blow-dries, a wedding party if we are unlucky, three generations of the one family who all book in together and argue the whole way through.

What nobody tells you about this job is that it is done entirely on your feet. I am up from half eight in the morning until the last woman is out the door with her fringe the way she likes it. I lean. That is the word for it. I lean over the basin when I am rinsing, I lean into the mirror when I am checking a line, I lean sideways with my hip cocked out while I snip around an ear. Twenty-two years of leaning. I never thought about my back once in all that time. It was just the thing that held me up while I got on with it.

Then, one wet Tuesday in February, it stopped being quiet.

The morning it announced itself

I was rinsing out a colour for a lovely woman called Bernie, a regular of mine, bent over her at the basin with the warm water going and my thumb working the shampoo through the back of her scalp. And something went in my lower back. Not a snap, not a drama. More like a door quietly clicking shut somewhere inside me. I straightened up and there it was, a hot line of pain that ran from the bottom of my spine, down through the cheek of my backside, and all the way down the back of my left leg to below the knee.

I laughed it off to Bernie. Said I must be getting old. Finished her blow-dry standing a bit crooked, favouring the good side, and got through the rest of the day on Nurofen and stubbornness. I thought I had pulled something. I thought a hot bath and an early night would sort it.

It did not sort it. Over the next few weeks it got worse, and it got worse in a way I did not understand. The pain was not really in my back at all, that was the strange thing. It was in my leg. A burning, and then a kind of electric buzzing, and then a numbness in my foot that frightened me more than the pain did. Some mornings I could not feel two of my toes properly. I would be standing at my own chair with the scissors in my hand and this feeling would travel down my leg like somebody had poured hot water inside the skin, and I would have to stop, mid-cut, and hold the edge of the counter and breathe until it passed.

You cannot do a good job on somebody's hair when half your mind is on your own leg. I know I gave a few people a worse cut than they deserved that spring, and I am not proud of it.

When the pain starts taking things

The thing about that kind of pain is that it is greedy. It does not just take the leg. It takes everything around it, one thing at a time, so slowly you barely notice until it is gone.

First it took my sleep. I could not lie flat. I could not lie on my left side at all. I ended up half sitting up against the headboard most nights with a pillow shoved under my knee, watching the ceiling and doing sums about money in my head. Then, with no sleep, it took my patience. I snapped at my youngest over nothing. I snapped at a lad in the salon who was only trying to help me sweep up. I was not myself and I knew it and I could not seem to stop it.

Then it started taking the work, and that was the part that put a real cold fear into me. Because I am self-employed. There is no sick pay for a woman with her own chair. If I do not stand up, I do not earn, it is that simple, and I have a mortgage on a house in Clondalkin and two teenagers who eat like horses. I started turning down the Saturday overflow. I started asking the girls to take my basin work so I would not have to bend. I did a wedding party in June standing like a question mark and cried in the little back kitchen afterwards where nobody could see me, not from the pain exactly, but from the feeling that my own body was quietly firing me from the only job I had ever known how to do.

My GP sent me for a scan, and the scan had a word in it I had been dreading. Herniated disc. The doctor was kind about it and drew me a little picture of the disc pressing on the nerve, which explained the leg, and then said the word that made my stomach drop. Surgery. He was careful, he said it might not come to that, that plenty of people settle down without it. But once the word is out in the room it does not go back in the box. All I could think was, how in the name of God would I take six or eight weeks off to have my spine operated on. Who pays the mortgage while I heal. What if it does not even work.

Somebody at the basin knew

It was Bernie, of all people, the very woman I had been rinsing when it first went, who put me onto another road. She was back in for her roots and she watched me shuffling around my own chair and she said, straight out, you cannot go on like this, love, you are grey in the face. And she told me about a physio her husband had gone to after he did his back lifting a fridge, a clinic not five minutes from the salon. She said he had gone in convinced he was for the surgeon and he had come out, months later, still with his own back intact and back playing his golf.

I was slow to believe it. I had already decided in my head that I was a hopeless case. But I was desperate enough by then to try anything that was not a scalpel, so I looked up the place she meant, a Clondalkin Physio practice near enough that I could walk there on my lunch if I had to, and I rang and made an appointment before I could talk myself out of it.

The first session was not what I expected. There was no miracle, and I was glad of that, because I have learned to be wary of anyone promising a miracle. The physio actually listened. He got me to describe the leg, the burning, the dead toes, the way it flared when I leaned over the basin, and he nodded like he had heard it a hundred times, which I suppose he had. He examined me properly, pressed here and there, had me bend and lift my leg and tell him where it bit. And then he explained the whole thing back to me in plain English, the disc, the nerve, why the pain was in my leg and not my back, why my job was quietly murdering me. Nobody had joined the dots like that for me before.

The slow road back to my own two feet

He talked me through a treatment I had never heard of, something called Non-surgical Spinal Decompression Therapy, which as far as my untrained brain could make out was a way of gently easing the pressure off the poor squashed nerve without anybody cutting me open. I lay on a table and there was a harness and a slow, steady sort of stretch, and honestly the strangest part was how undramatic it all was. I kept waiting for it to hurt. It did not. I nearly fell asleep on the table the second time, which, given I had not slept properly in months, tells you something.

I want to be honest, because I would hate for anyone reading this to think it was a magic switch. It was not. It was slow. It was weeks. There were sessions where I came out feeling grand and mornings after where the leg grumbled again and I thought, here we go, I am back to square one. He gave me exercises to do at home, small unglamorous ones on the bedroom floor before work, and he showed me how to stand at the basin without wrecking myself, how to bend from the hip, how to bring the client up to me instead of folding myself down to them. Small things. Twenty-two years of leaning wrong, undone a little at a time.

But it came back. My sleep came back first. Then the feeling in my toes, which I will never take for granted again. Then, week by week, the leg quietened, the burning line cooled off, and one ordinary Thursday I realised I had done a full day, basins and all, and had not once had to grip the counter and breathe.

I still mind my back now. I still do the floor exercises, most mornings, and I still go for the odd session to the Physio in Clondalkin when I feel the leg getting notiony, because I would rather catch it early than ever go back to that spring. I am not fixed the way a young one is fixed. I am a forty-something woman who stands up for a living and always will. But I am standing. I am working. My hands are steady and my patience is back and Bernie still comes in for her roots, and every single time she sits into my chair the two of us have a little laugh about the day it all started, right there over that same basin.

If you had told me, that wet February morning, that I would come through it with my own back and my own livelihood, I would not have believed you. I am glad I was wrong.