Spinal

On Sunday, I put my back out. Not completely certain of how, but I’m pretty certain it involved a load of garden furniture in the car, then losing my temper while getting it all back out of the car at home.

Then stupidly (in hindsight) I sat down on the floor to assemble the new table – yep, I braved the joys of self-assembly garden furniture, and achieved it with no swearing and no pain. Well, not ’til I stood up again having done the job – or at least I tried to stand up.

At that point my lower back hurt enough that I nearly passed out – full-on black and white vision, the lot. Really not funny. Luckily I’d already unpacked all the new garden chairs, so I was able to road-test one of those while waiting for everything to get back to normal.

My pain threshold is pretty high. Not awesomely high, or “stick needles in me and I won’t notice” high, but high enough that I’ve been able to do stupid things like walk on a totally stuffed ankle, get annoyed with a nagging toenail and pull the entire thing out, or have various dental bits done without painkillers. And yet the pain in my back was enough – and I suppose surprising enough and sudden enough – that it made it almost unbearable at the start.

It’s got better since – looks more like a twisted muscle than a stuffed disc, for example – and while I was fragile yesterday, I was still able to go in to work and do most of the normal stuff. The only two things I actually wimped out on were a) walking Hound and b) getting the rest of the growbags out of the boot of the car. Walking would’ve been painful, lifting bags of compost again would’ve been truly, epically, weapons-grade stupid.

Today’s a bit better again, thankfully. But it’s made me rather more aware of my back for a while, and I’ll try not to re-stuff it. Frankly, it fucking hurts.