Confessional: I'm broken

This is something I've been debating about writing about for a long time. It is easy to write about others and issues, but not so easy to divulge personal crap that I'm going through. You see, I'm broken.

Biological Misfit. Accident-Prone. The Klutz. The Most Clumsy Graceful Person I've Known. The Doctor's Mortgage Payer.

These are all nicknames I've owned, and still own in the case of the Doctor, except I've moved on from his mortgage and payed for a kitchen remodel, a backyard and pool remodel, and his new "day driver" Beamer.

Since I was a kid, my brain has always been getting me in trouble with my body. I am a daredevil by nature and like to act first and think later when it comes to fun things. It started with things like tree climbing, and walking ON TOP of Monkey Bars and jumping off of things. From there it evolved into things like figure skating, skydiving, and skiing.

All that fun has come at a price, though. It broke me. Literally. A broken clavicle here, a fractured tibia there, and a stress-fractured back there. Nobody bothered to give me one piece of advice when I was younger, that I really could have used though.

Those injuries... they may heal and feel great at the time, but they leave things behind: Damaged nerves, scar tissue, and ARTHRITIS. So, when you get "old" all of those "little" injuries are going to take a physical toll on you. And by "old", I mean THIRTY (which I already am).

So, I'm broken. When I was a figure skater, I fractured a little bone in the bottom of my spine. I was about 14 and I did it while doing repetitive layback spins. (I also had a genetic predisposition to having this kind of fracture which I did not know before it happened.) Here's a photo of me doing these spins... (I mean Sascha Cohen doing an impersonation of me doing these spins):

Photo Courtesy: Tom Theobald

That little broken bone caused my spine to go on a migration. That migration happened for about six years until it finally caused enough havoc that a doctor told me to fuse it.

When I first had this problem, they told me that it was a very low risk that anything would happen due to the fracture. They said it was only a 10% chance it would develop into Spondylolisthesis, which is a progressive slip of the vertebra.  Even if that happened, it would be a relatively small risk that I would even need surgery.

As with every other circumstance, it seems I'm always the 1% or 2% or THE ONE person that will have a bad outcome. I developed Spondylolisthesis and it eventually progressed enough for me to quit figure skating at the age of 20 and have surgery.

Nowadays, if you had that fracture, they would fix it immediately. But, that was not the case "back then".

At the age of 20, this is what my spine looked like (or what it would have looked like if they did an artist's rendering of it):

Unfortunately, when things start migrating in your body, you start to get impingement on nerves and the nerves start to get stretched out. The muscles go crazy and start spasming to try and keep everything aligned.

When nerves get pinched for a long time, they become permanently scarred and damage. They continue to send signals to the brain that they are injured long after the injury has happened and healed.

I finally had the spine bones fused which reduced the pain into my legs by 95% and reduced the muscle spasms a lot, but not totally. So, surgery wasn't a fix-all solution for me, unfortunately.

I keep hoping that one day, I can have something done or do some kind of therapy that will undo the damage I did to my body. I see a chiropractor, I've done tons of physical therapy, had multitudes of injections and blocks, and tried experimental therapies.

I recently (two weeks ago) had a procedure which burns the nerves that sense pain around the vertebrae. It's called an RFA (Radio Frequency Ablation). Nobody told me that a certain percentage of people who have this procedure have increased pain and spasms for WEEKS after the procedure. Of course, I'm that person and I've been trying my best to just get through it here lately. I'm tired of laying in bed and missing out on life, though.

With all of this, people often wonder how and why I still do all of the activities I do! I'm going to get into that in my next blog post, but the short answer is, "My spine is stable and there is nothing I can do that will further injure it (except, apparently, procedures which are designed to lessen pain) and so keeping my back as healthy as I can and having fun lessens the pain."

If I could take it back (the figure skating) I would... but since I can't, here's a photo to enjoy that actually is me: