No Laptop, No Mobility, No Problem

If you'll recall, I ran over myself back in 2008. This left me in lots of pain and unable to do much of anything for a while. Not long after that, I was moving furniture, or helping my dad move my furniture, out of a storage building, and I got mad and bent over to pick up this desk by myself. As I wrote in that post, it felt like something snapped in my lower back and every "bend with your knees" poster I'd ever seen in every break room of every job I'd ever had flashed before my eyes. That left me in even more pain and even less able to move than before.

Every once in a while that back pain flares up. It seems to happen when I'm most stressed out. For example, last year it happened when my mom went into the hospital and earlier this year, it happened in the midst of all of the South Carolina work. Well, approximately two weeks ago, I woke up with a slight pain in my back, and I wanted to cry. It starts out with just a little soreness, like I slept funny or something, but if I don't start taking the medication my doctor prescribed, I'm screwed within another day or two. If you've never had a back spasm or had your back seize up, you haven't known pain. If you've never spent six hours on the floor because that happened every time you tried to stand up, you've never experienced despair. Unfortunately, that's the kind of stuff that this always leads to. It's just horrible.

By the Sunday before Thanksgiving, I was walking around in a 90 degree angle. I couldn't stand up straight. And I only had 5 pills left of my prescription. I tried to space them out, but that just led to them not working. That night, I was laid out on the sofa with Icy Hot caked all over my back, a heating pad underneath me, and my laptop in my lap. I decided it was time to try to transfer myself to my bedroom, but I didn't see that the laptop cord was caught on the little folding table I usually keep it on in my living room, and when I went to set it on the table, it didn't quite make contact. I went to grab it before it hit the floor, but the whole back thing made it impossible to move that fast, and in the end, the little part of the cord that plugs in to charge the laptop broke. I couldn't believe it.

I hurried before the battery died to do some of the work I needed to do for the week and email some files to myself as I had no idea how long it'd be before I could get a cord. Little did I know, it'd be almost two weeks before I had computer access again. The day after Thanksgiving, my mom drove me out to my ex-aunt's house to try an extra one she had, but it didn't work. I ordered one on Amazon, but it didn't work. Right now, as I type this, I've borrowed an old laptop from my aunt.

Anyway, I spent the days following the incident laying on the sofa, watching TV, and thanking God and Steve Jobs for the iPhone. I was in so much pain that I didn't really mind being computerless at first. However, I also couldn't drive (seriously, can't even turn my neck or the steering wheel), so leaving the house was pretty much out of the question too. As a matter of fact, outside of my grandfather's house for Thanksgiving and that trip to get a cord, I didn't leave the house for nearly 10 days. I bet you can imagine what I smelled like. (For what it's worth, you have to step up to get into my shower, and I tried that once and nearly broke my neck. At least the Icy Hot masked the stench of unwashedness.)

With it being Thanksgiving week, most of the people I knew were spending the week with their families, so there wasn't really anyone to talk to. And since I couldn't drive, I couldn't go anywhere. Basically, I watched more TV than any one person should, watched more movies than I knew existed (dreading my cable bill next month), and I played approximately 739 games of Battleship on my phone.

I have to say, it was almost nice not having contact with the outside world, even though not being able to work was annoying. It was nice not to check Facebook and Twitter and email every five minutes. Don't get me wrong, I still checked it a lot (AT&T even sent me a note about my increased data usage), but I just didn't feel the need to be so tune in with everything going on in the lives of everyone else. I actually got some things I'd been wanting to work on done. And I got pretty stir crazy, but it was nice to relax and not worry about much of anything. If I didn't need the laptop for work purposes, I probably could have been even more relaxed, but that's kind of out of the question with my career at the moment.

Another downside was that I was supposed to have the book finished by that Tuesday and that never happened. I even had people coming over for dinner and a reading, which I had to cancel. One night, I did get kind of lofty and pulled out a notebook and a pen. Within five minutes my hand was cramping up, and I could barely read a thing I wrote.

Oh, well. Enough about me. I am working on a post about Newt Gingrich (gag), but that will have to come next week. Today was all about the Dawgs and finally finishing the book! Tomorrow is all about cleaning and getting the house decorated for Christmas, and Monday is my rescheduled book reading gathering thing.

I'll try to post less rambling things in the future, but I just wanted to say I haven't dropped off the face of the earth; I was just forced to take a step back, and I kind of enjoyed it.