mike the mountain

Cross-post from Rebuilding the Mountain

TL;DR – Tore up my back last year, MRI just came back clean, tracking my recovery here.

Forever ago I was born.

Decades ago I grew up tall and I grew up fast (not so quick or mean; wrong name). 6′ 4″ by 12 years old.

Something I was surprised to learn at that age: not everything in your body grows at the same time or rate. Things like your bones, muscles, tendons… when you go through a series of crazy rapid growth spurts they don’t all keep up with each other.

Flash forward through many wonderful years of high activity and bodily destruction. My doctor told me to think of it like an old elastic band, stretched to it’s maximum and held for years. It wasn’t that I did anything huge and dramatic, just lifting some decently heavy (for me) weights, and my form slipped a little. And like the proverbial camel’s back, those elastic bands snapped (metaphor inception FTW!). One of my vertebrae slipped, tearing ligaments in my lower back and impacting against some kind of important nerves.

(Could have been much worse. The nerves that got tweaked just caused some weird shooting pain down my leg. If the disc had slipped another direction and hit a different set of nerves I could have been dealing with really nasty problems like bowel control and impotence!)

This was September 2010. Not realizing the extent of the damage, I went home, threw on an ice pack, and proceeded to try and stretch it out. For the next week, I twisted and pulled and bent and did everything to try and work out what I thought was just a pulled muscle. Finally went to see a doctor (walk-in clinic), and without even examining me he said the same thing I thought: just a pulled muscle, suck it up. So for the next three months, I just kept working it, stretching hard, going to yoga, even seeing a chiropractor on a friend’s recommendation (never before and likely never again, but that’s a discussion for a different time). All this time I was making the injury even worse, re-tearing the tissues over and over again. Not sleeping, couldn’t sit at my desk, just feeling horrible.

It was actually the chrio who finally asked me what my x-rays said. “What x-rays?” He went white. He had been working on me under the assumption that the first doctor actually knew what the F$%& he was talking about when he told me it was “just a pulled muscle”. Stop everything, go see a real doctor, get your x-rays. This was December.

Saw doc, got x-rays. Doc said I had done so much damage in the last few months trying to “fix” things, that he couldn’t tell what the original injury was or if/how it was healing. So new orders: do nothing. Nothing. No lifting, no bending, don’t walk or stand for more than 20 minutes. No sexy fun-time. For a month.

January 2011, I’m back to see my doctor, and he confirms that I’ve torn the hell out of my lower back. The only thing I can do is rest and wait. “It’s like a broken bone, you can’t work through it or stretch it better, it just has to heal.” Timeline? “At least a year before you’re at 90%.” Can I get ANY exercise? “Walk. Best thing for your back, and pretty much the only thing that won’t strain the area and make your recovery even longer.”

Depressed, bored, weak, I sit and watch as my beloved Rocky Mountains break every snowfall record on the books and have their greatest ski/snowboard season in history. While I sit. Walk around the track at the YMCA in the mornings for 20 minutes. Weeks. Months. I actually start to feel a bit more normal, not in constant pain, able to sleep most of the night. And I forget just how vulnerable I am.

March, I borrowed my dad’s snowblower. Doesn’t weigh that much, I’ll just throw it in the back of my truck. Sure it’s a bit awkward, but it’s nothing…

Seven months since the original injury and I’m back at square one. Fuck. Me.

Since then I’ve been back doing nothing, going for the occasional walk. Eating and drinking like I didn’t give a crap, because I didn’t. Never felt worse in my life. Combine that with the total inactivity, and of course I’ve put on a bunch of fat, gained probably 4 inches around my gut, and lost what muscle I had.

Follow-up MRI in July, reviewed results with Doc yesterday. Good news: no permanent nerve damage, tears have healed (though still extremely weak). Got the official go-ahead to start exercising again.

Hence this.

I will be using this blog to track my progress, record stats, talk about the recovery process. Most of it will be pretty boring to anyone not me: what I ate, how long I rode my bike, etc. Like I say in the description, this blog’s for me. If it can help someone else, great, but really all I’m looking for is a place to review my work and use the shame of public failure as motivation. So on that note, thanks for reading and please feel free to send any advice or questions you have my way.

The universe is probably littered with the one-planet graves of cultures which made the sensible economic decision that there’s no good reason to go into space–each discovered, studied, and remembered by the ones who made the irrational decision.

The hover-text in Monday’s xkcd hit me just right.

Required something a touch more personal than a mention on Twitter or Facebook. I need to remember things like this.

Maybe that’s what this thing is now.

Holy crap has it really been nearly three months since I was on here? I need to start trying to form coherent thoughts that take more than 140 characters to elucidate.

There’s a thought that’s been rattling around in my head for a while and I need to get it out. I don’t want to, because it’s depressing and unhealthy and generally something on which I don’t like focusing, but at this point it’s become like holding in a fart on a crowded bus.

I’m 33 as I write this. Let’s say, for the sake of simple math, I live to be 93. As well, for simplicity’s sake and a touch of optimism, let us assume I am able to travel and function and enjoy my faculties right up to the end. That gives me 60 years. 720 months. A little less than 22,000 days. Most people would say that sounds like a lot. To me, it is a terrifyingly, infinitesimally small amount of time.

There is something like 195 countries in the world. I used to consider myself fairly well-traveled, fortunate enough to grow up in a family with the means and desire to see the world. But when I really think about it, I’ve maybe visited 8 actual different independent nations (E.g., Canada, USA) . Some for only a day, which can hardly be considered a true experience of the culture. That leaves 187 countries in which I’ve never set foot. If I want to see them all, that means I need to average just over 3 new countries a year, for the rest of my life. This year, our big travel plans are Vancouver. Maybe, if we have a really good year, Mexico in the winter. Those will be great trips, but I still haven’t eaten a-ping in Cambodia or wrestled a zebu in Madagascar. It is a 100% impossibility for any one person to experience every culture the world has to offer, or will offer. And some days it genuinely pisses me off.

Here is Wikipedia’s list of best-selling books.

Here’s Time’s ALL TIME 100 best English-language novels.

Here are 100 Must-Read Books for the Essential Man’s Library.

Here are the 100 Most Influential Books Ever Written.

Here are 1001 books you MUST READ BEFORE YOU DIE.

I love to read. Most books take me a long time to get through; I usually only read a few pages at a time before going to sleep. Let’s say I read 6 books a year (which is probably optimistic). That means I will likely read approximately 360 more books before I die. Even if I double, or triple my reading rate, how many books is that? If I just decide to read all 1001 books (BEFORE I DIE), I’ll need to average about 16 a year. More than one per month. Just for those “classics” that “everyone” “should” read. No room for small-time, self-published books that I might love, that I might connect with on a deep personal level. No cult-y, off-beat stuff that no critic would ever consider essential reading, but that I might thoroughly enjoy. Comics? I’ve read Watchmen, the only one that ever seems to show up on these lists. I just finished re-reading the whole Transmetropolitan series; one of my absolute favourite stories and characters from any media. Which “best” novel must I give up so I can finish reading The Walking Dead? Or the next Dark Tower novel? Again, it is a 100% impossibility for any one person to experience every piece of literature the world has to offer, or will offer. And some days it genuinely pisses me off.

(This is becoming a very negative post, and I apologize for that, but for some reason these thoughts of mortality and lost experiences have been stuck in my head for a while, and I’m really hoping that this will exercise those demons.)

I often share this personal maxim with friends: “You haven’t had your favourite meal yet.” I mean it in the sense of “You don’t know if you’ll like it until you try it.” I believe that in a broad sense, also more literally there is so much food out there to try in the world, that (statistically speaking), you probably never will get to try what would be your favourite meal. That upsets me. There is more music and movies and games and art that has been created and will be created than can ever be heard or watched or played or experienced. That upsets me. But it also motivates me.

I crave new experiences. When I visit a new restaurant, and there is something on the menu that I don’t already know what it will taste like, I have to try it. If I’m going somewhere new, I’m going to seek out things unique to that place, experiences to have that I haven’t had before, or won’t be able to have elsewhere. This is a vital part of my life. At least I want it to be. But like so many people, so much of my life is safe and sedate, rote and routine. This is a conscious and accepted choice; I want financial and familial success, stability at the core of my life, and a future certain enough for me to take greater risks along the fringes. I live where I live and work where I work because I believe it likely to lead me to a place of financial means and flexible time enough to do many of those adventures that I crave, and to do them with people I love and a family to grow with. There are people who make different choices, and I am grateful to know of them. I may not be able to experience everything the world has to offer, but I can experience so much more vicariously through the sharing of others’.

OK, thank you Internet, for letting me get this off my chest. Writing it did what I hoped it would: get me to break the mental feedback loop of focusing on all the things I won’t get to enjoy in this world, and instead fire me up once again about all the things that I will! One final extra-nerdy thought: we level up by gaining EXPERIENCE; don’t let your life become a grind.

(TL;DR – Try the special.)