Pain in the butt

I strained something in my sacroiliac area this weekend. Thursday I had played golf for the first time in a year or so, and I awakened Friday with generalized soreness, as I expected. In my experience, the best way to work out the soreness is to stay active, so I powerwashed the patio and worked on the pool a bit. As I bent over to dump some chemicals in the pool, a sharp pain in my left lower back/buttock area screamed HELLO!

"You have ignored me for a long time, but this.....SHARP.....PAIN! will ensure that you give me my proper respect from now on," my butt muscle taunted. Even so, it seemed nothing more than a little tweak; a nuisance that would soon be over and done with. I've had worse, I thought.

Not so, my middle-aged body was about to tell me the next morning. When I awakened, I found that I couldn't turn over without the sensation of a hot poker impaling my butt cheek. Nor could I sit up. And yet, my bladder begged relief of its discomfort too. I must get up. As I forced myself to stand up, I let out a scream that would have made Howard Dean jealous. My vision started to go black as I nearly passed out, so I lay back down on the bed.

My son came running to see what was the matter, never having heard such a shreak before, certainly not from me. I must have a low pain tolerance, I thought to myself. It took me twenty minutes and several more Deans to get out of bed and limp to the bathroom.

It's weird how one little muscle can stop you in your tracks. The ability to walk is a complicated symphony of movements, and if any one component is injured then walking becomes difficult. The main impairment with this injury is the ability to bend over or to get out of a chair. Unfortunately, these are two motions that are required numerous times during the course of an ED shift, and so until I am healed I am unable to work.

I can barely put my pants on, and driving is out of the question. But I'm getting better, slowly.