The Van, The Disc, And The Long Way Back to Myself

When your job is a chair with wheels

I am forty-two and I have driven a delivery van around Dublin for the best part of eleven years, though I should probably spell that properly, eleven years, because the tiredness makes me sloppy these days. My round takes me out through Clondalkin most mornings, then loops toward the city, then back out again by the afternoon. I know the timing of the lights on the Naas Road better than I know some of my cousins. For a long time the job was just the job. You climb in, you climb out, you lift the parcels, you climb back in. Hundreds of times a day. I never once thought about my back. It was just there, holding me up, doing what backs do.

That changed the way most of these things change, which is to say quietly and then all at once. It started as a stiffness low down on the right side, the kind you shrug off as a bad night's sleep or a cold seat. I would twist to reach a parcel in the back and feel a little catch, a pinch, nothing worth mentioning. I did not mention it. That is the thing about being a man in his forties with two kids and a mortgage. You file the small pains under "later" and you keep moving because the parcels do not deliver themselves and the diesel does not pay for itself.

The leg that stopped feeling like mine

The part that frightened me was not the back. It was the leg. One Tuesday, somewhere near Kingswood, I noticed my right leg had gone strange. Not sore exactly. Numb. A dead, buzzing sort of numb, like when you sit on your foot too long, except it would not shake off. It ran from my backside down the outside of my thigh and into my calf, and there was a tingling in it, a fizzing that came and went with no warning. I remember standing on a doorstep with a box in my hands, ringing a bell, and realising I could not properly feel the pavement under my right foot. That is a horrible thing when your whole living depends on pressing pedals in traffic.

I went to the GP eventually, after my wife more or less pushed me out the door. He pressed here and there, lifted my leg while I lay on the table, and said the word that had been sitting in the back of my own head anyway. Disc. A bulging disc in the lower spine, leaning on a nerve, and the nerve running all the way down the leg like a wire with the insulation stripped. He said a lot of these settle with time and care. He also said the word surgery, gently, as a thing that existed on the far shelf if nothing else worked. I heard nothing after that word for a good few seconds. I just heard "surgery" and pictured myself flat on my back for weeks, no wage coming in, my wife carrying everything on her own.

Nights I would not wish on anyone

People who have never had it do not understand what nerve pain does to your nights. I could get to sleep fine. It was staying asleep that broke me. I would wake at two, at three, at half four, with the leg screaming or, worse, with it gone completely dead so that I had to hang it off the side of the bed and wait for the fizzing to come back, which sounds mad, being glad of pins and needles, but that is where I was. I would lie there listening to the fridge and the odd car going past and I would do the sums in my head about work and money and how long a body can go on this little rest.

And the tiredness turned me into someone I did not like. I have two kids, a boy of nine and a girl who was four at the time, and they are only children, they do child things, they are loud and they climb and they ask the same question forty times. I found myself snapping at them over nothing. My little girl would put her arms up to be lifted, the most ordinary thing in the world, and I would have to say not now, love, Daddy's back is sore, and the look on her face each time took a chip out of me. I could not lift my own daughter. That sentence went round and round in my head on the bad nights. What kind of a father cannot pick up his own child.

Choosing the slow road instead of the knife

I did not want surgery. I will be honest that a good part of that was fear, plain fear of being cut open near my spine, but part of it was also stubbornness and the money worry and a feeling that I had not really tried anything yet. So before I let anyone talk about theatres and waiting lists I looked for another way in. A neighbour of mine, an older fella who had been through something similar with his neck, told me not to rush, to get proper hands on it first, and he pointed me toward Clondalkin Physio as a starting point rather than going straight for the operation.

That first appointment I was half expecting to be told to cop on and just get the surgery. Instead I got a long conversation. Actual questions about my day, how I sat, how I lifted, how I slept, how far the numbness went. The physio had me move in different directions and watched which ones lit up the pain and which ones eased it. For the first time somebody was treating the whole picture and not just my one sore spot. It was oddly emotional, sitting there being taken seriously after months of just gritting my teeth and driving.

What the treatment actually felt like

The plan was a mix of things over several weeks. There were exercises, small and specific, that I had to do at home morning and evening, and honestly at the start I resented them because they were dull and I was exhausted. There was hands on work to loosen everything that had seized up around the injury from months of me guarding it. And there was a machine part of it too, a kind of gentle traction where I lay on a table and the lower half was drawn slowly away to ease the pressure off the disc and give that trapped nerve a bit of room to breathe. They called it Non-surgical Spinal Decompression Therapy, and I remember the relief of lying there feeling the pull come on slow and steady, nothing violent about it, just a long easing that I could feel travel down into the leg.

I want to be straight about it, it was not a magic switch. There was no single morning where I woke up cured and leapt out of bed. It was slower and more stubborn than that, a bit better then a bit worse then a bit better again, like the tide coming in with the odd wave pulling back. But over the weeks the direction was clearly one way. The nights got longer between the wakings. The dead feeling in the foot came back to life. I started to trust the leg on the pedals again in heavy traffic, which did more for my nerves than I can say.

The morning it came back

The thing I remember most is not a medical thing at all. It was a Saturday, a few weeks in, and my daughter came running down the hall the way small kids do, full tilt, arms already up. And without thinking about it, without doing the usual quick fearful check of my own back, I bent and scooped her up onto my hip. She was giggling about something and did not notice a thing. I stood there in the hall holding her, and I had to blink a fair bit, because it was the most normal moment imaginable and it had been gone from my life for the best part of a year.

I still do the exercises. I have learned the hard way that a back like mine needs minding, especially with a job that is basically lifting and sitting all day long. I have changed how I get in and out of the van, how I take a box down, when I stop and stretch. I kept going back for the ongoing Physio in Clondalkin even after the worst of it passed, because I would rather do the boring maintenance than ever go back to those two in the morning nights. If you are reading this with your own leg buzzing and the word surgery hanging over you, I am not going to tell you what to do. I only know that for me the slow road was worth walking first, and that the day I could lift my little girl again I would not have traded for anything.