Murphy's Law

Murphy’s Law (mûr'fēz law) noun : the law or principle that if anything can go wrong, it will.

“We’re going to need to do an MRI,” my doctor said.

That told me all I needed to know. For the previous week I had been walking around in pain, the muscles of my lower back twitching this way and that for no explainable reason. I was scheduled to leave for Ecuador in a week, but suddenly I could see all my plans slipping away. Lying on the table in my doctor’s office I stared at the ceiling and absorbed the news.

A few days earlier I had awoke to discover my back in excruciating pain. It hurt just to move. There had been no warning, no discomfort, nothing to suggest that anything was wrong. And yet there I was, lying in bed trying to figure out how to get up. A week of intense discomfort was enough for me to admit that something was wrong. The MRI revealed that I had an “L5-S1 herniated disk.” Or, as most of us would say, a slipped disk. It’s not an uncommon problem, but it is a serious one, and I wasn’t going anywhere until things improved. I reluctantly cancelled my plane ticket, not quite sure what I was going to do next.

My next stop was a consult with a neurosurgeon; Iwas pleasantly relieved when she opined that surgery would not be required. “I can do it if you want,” she said with a grin on her face, “but I think you’ll be fine with some less dramatic treatment.”

So for those of you who expected me to be in South America by now… well, there it is. I have spent the better part four months attempting to get back to “normal.” At first that meant twice-weekly physical therapy sessions and a couple of epidural steroid injections, as well as a six-week period where I wasn’t supposed to sit down. (Try to go for a week without sitting in a chair sometime and you’ll get the idea.) More recently it has evolved into lots of walking and even a bit of easy hiking.

I keep reminding myself that there’s a silver lining in all of this: I discovered the problem a week before going to Ecuador, and not a week after arriving. The last four months have also given me a lot of time to do a few things I never got around to when I was working, so in the whole scheme of things it hasn’t been a disaster.

I think it’s time to book a new flight to Quito…