Things You Learn With a Bad Back - Volume 13

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My day started way too early, and that is always the first sign of trouble. There really is only one true foe of an agonizing back, and that would be hurrying. My existence is not the same as it used to be, because above all else I require at least 2 hours of "up" time before I can even take a shower in the morning. Even after that it is going to be a slow shower. I lose any ability to have a slow anything these days and there is nothing I can do about it.

I used to be a morning person actually. I could wake up at 5am, shoot out of bed and get more done before 7am then most people could in an entire week. It was in my nature and it all changed when my miserable job hurt my back. I could blame myself for the injury and have in the past, but lately I have taken the more practical approach of blaming the job. I truly believe that my fault lays purely in acceptance of the surroundings and doing what I was told. Now I am a bit of an overworked, loose cannon plotting revenge. Sometimes simple tricks, but more and more often it has been growing into fabulous disasters that could get me imprisoned. I walk a fine line of insanity, but that is the dark secret of a really agonizing back injury. Don’t fool yourself though, because not everyone is out to get you, but a lot of them are, and those that aren’t still don’t understand if they don’t have a bad back.

My own grasping at sanity could have been my worst enemy through it all. In the beginning you didn't see the plotting clearly enough to think what you saw was reasonable, and by the time you do it seems too far along to be taken seriously. Fear takes you at this point and you think that being "right" or "principled" is a badge of honor and it isn't at all. The human resources director walking around and spreading the "rumor" that she had heard you hurt yourself at a previous job had formed the "legend" that you deserved all of your hell. How do you deal with the fact that your medical treatment was bungled, and you ended up worse because they put you back to work when "their" doctor was unavailable, and then he lied to you about what was wrong? How can this not start to wear on you when you are making less than everyone else and in agony a year later? Now you are terrified because you aren't healthy enough to get another job, when your health had always been your best asset.

at that point the delusions start in your head, from the ex wife that left you and your kids forcing you to take that job, to the mother of those kids that won't pay a dime to support them, to that fucking bitch at work who broke you. They don’t go away either. Days like today when i had to get up 3 hours early, shower and get dressed in 15 minutes with all three kids and grandmother crammed into the same room that I am sitting half naked in trying to put my socks on embarrassed. It sucks and it is all unfair that I have to stew over things like that and just get hateful. now as I sit at a doctor’s appointment with my father, back on fire, exhausted, typing out all of this on a cell phone (yeah thanks to alternate reality through "phone yahoo" I have gotten almost as fast typing on a phone) hoping that it gets over quickly so that I can get another couple hours in before work, and like always trying to keep the volatile hatred towards everyone I could blame for anything out of my head by pressing keys on a phone.

I hear other people press phone keys when they feel like this too. not the same way of course, because I have always been phone phobic, and more over as my mind poisons over the last 2 years I have become more people phobic than anything else. I hate people for wanting things or taking up my time that I don’t have, making me get up too early and put my socks on too fast. People annoy me and realistically they always have but now of all damn things, I don’t have time to squeeze them in. It just looks like I do nothing when in reality, crawling from my futon to my chair everyday to sit for an hour to get up the energy to wander around the shower for 30 minutes before I take the customary 20 minutes or so to get dressed is agony in more ways than one. I used to take that all for granted, and now I wonder what child of mine will hear me lose it the next time they give me grief for not "snapping out of me" soon enough. I have no sanity anymore. Just a thin veil that holds me together and I just hope that my own self righteousness can carry me through whatever I do when I finally snap. Fuck em’ it will be a fabulous disaster ;8o)