I can't remember exactly what I was doing when it happened. The morning had started normally enough. It was a Tuesday and I'd woken up before my alarm
—this part was not normal, and the subsequent consequences almost certainly ensure it will never happen again. I fed my cat and watered my plants. I made a cup of coffee. I washed the dishes I'd left in the sink overnight. Maybe it was then that I first started to feel...something in my back. It wasn't quite pain yet, or at least not a type of discomfort that was unfamiliar. I decided I needed to stretch. This I remember clearly; I tend to remember my mistakes.
I bent over, touched the floor, felt that something light up with the sort of pleasant unpleasantness of a deep stretch. There, I thought, fixed it. I stood up straight and very quickly realized that I had not fixed it.
I've never had back pain before, not really. I've had the sort of aches that anyone who spends their day hunched over a computer does; before Tuesday morning, that's what I thought back pain was. I've since learned, not for the first time and almost certainly not for the last, how expansive a word like pain can be, and how much it can encompass. Tears stung furiously at my eyes. I made a sound that startled my cat enough that he looked up from his breakfast. The pain was unlike anything I'd experienced before, sharp and staggering in its sprawl. I'd never quite appreciated how essential my back was to...well, everything, until everything caused it to spasm with that tear-inducing pain. Sitting down became a problem, as did standing up. I came to dread lateral movement, and the twists essential to the task of using the bathroom.
The first person I told was my trainer, with whom I had a session later that night. I texted with my left hand; holding anything in my right for too long summoned that increasingly-familiar pain. "I’m not sure exactly what happened, I think I probably just slept weird? if it’s possible/not too much work to adjust tonight’s workout, I think I’ll need to take it easy." Of my many flaws, optimism is among the most fundamental.
Here is an example of that: For five whole hours, I continued to think I'd make it to the gym. During those hours I took Aleve and Tylenol, which did little to nothing. I sweated through a podcast recording, a heating pad blazing against my back in my un-air-conditioned apartment. I spent a not-insignificant amount of my therapy session talking about my back. Not about the pain—at that point there wasn't much to say about it except ow. Instead I couldn't help laughing about the timing of its arrival: I'd recently told my therapist that at some point in this last year of my twenties, I'd finally started feeling like an adult. I couldn't locate the origin of that feeling; it had just arrived, its presence undeniable. It felt like a relief. I'd never enjoyed the helplessness of youth.
In the sitcoms that populate my childhood—The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, Family Matters, The George Lopez Show—adults are almost always throwing their backs out. The act always seemed dramatic, the pain comedically contorting their bodies. Maybe that's why it has been so frustrating that I can't remember exactly when that something in my own back began. Adulthood, as I've experienced it, has been far less climatic than I'd been led to believe or expect—and, in this case, it's been much more visceral than I could have ever been prepared for. I told my therapist that throwing my back out had made those scenes take on a new valence. "I finally understand why everyone talks about this," I said. She suggested I get a muscle relaxant.
One of the screening questions in the telehealth intake form I filled out later that afternoon was "If you've experienced similar symptoms in the past, were you prescribed any treatments? If so, what did you try and did it help?" I answered, "I've never experienced anything like this before." I finally cancelled my session with my trainer. I called my best friend and sheepishly asked her to make a pharmacy run for me. I remembered the versions of me who would have balked at asking for help, or just at cancelling last-minute; I remembered the versions of me that felt my humanity was something to apologize for.
For the next three days, anyone who talked to me long enough heard about my fucked up back. There's a specific euphoria that comes with discovering a new and effective class of drugs; for a week I was as evangelical about cyclobenzaprine as I was about Lexapro when I first began taking it in 2021. But there was also this feeling I had, one I'd felt the first time I threw up at 21 and the first time I'd gotten stitches the year after that. It was a feeling I also remembered from my first kiss, and from the first time I started to fall in love. It was a feeling of finally understanding something that, up until that point, I'd only experienced secondhand.
Yesterday, I finally made it back to the gym. My back is still prone to achiness if I sit without support for too long, but that sharp, new pain has been blessedly absent for a few days now. In its rearview, I've caught myself wondering if it was ever that bad, if I'd maybe exaggerated its impact. There's something jarring in how quickly it came and went, how quickly it expanded my worldview and then left the scene. I still can't remember exactly where it began or how it started, and I still don't know why it happened. I doubt I ever will. I have the whole rest of my life to think about it.
