Ouch, My Back!

My husband has had chronic back problems pretty much as long as we've been together, so I'm quite used to being the one assigned to do any heavy lifting around the house. (Taxi and delivery drivers often look a little startled to see the woman in the relationship make a dash to pick up all the heavy items while the man shuffles his feet awkwardly.)

Except... my time to also have back problems seems to have arrived at last. While I was visiting my mother last week, my back started to ache after a few days, and for the last couple of days of my stay I became pretty useless as merely shambling around the house was already enough of an effort. The husband blames my old bed, which makes his own back ache every time we visit together, but I figured, it's my old bed, surely it can't hurt me?! But no, it seems my body has reached a point where spending several nights sleeping on a pretty hard mattress that felt perfectly fine to me in my twenties is no longer something I can take for granted in my forties.

On the day of my return to the UK I dosed myself up with some heavy painkillers, which helped with making it home as I was more or less insensate by the time I boarded the air plane, but all that walking, bending and lugging my suitcase around probably didn't do my back any favours, so once the painkillers wore off the next day, I became pretty paralysed.

And oh my god, is having a back injury annoying! There's just no proper reprieve from it - even sitting or lying down will only do so much; the affected muscles are always doing something. I want to give them a rest to give them a chance to heal but it's weirdly difficult. It's now been a week and I feel things have barely improved, though I did dare to leave the house for the first time today to shamble to the corner store. The irrational part of my brain was screaming at me about why I was walking so slowly that white-haired senior citizens were overtaking me, but I just couldn't do any better yet.

Middle age kind of sucks... though at least I now have more of an appreciation for what my husband goes through whenever he has one of his episodes.