How the Mighty Fall: Limbo

The second chapter of this story gave us a peek at how bad things can get. Losing control of faculties, losing consciousness, vomiting, screaming like a crazy person: all of these are well and good on a Friday night, or your 21st birthday. But when you are a completely sober adult in your 30's and in the middle of a work day, not so much.

I said I'd conclude the story in this third installment, and there is still a good amount of it left, so it looks like I have my work cut out for me. I don't even like thinking about this time in my life, but I recognize that others can benefit from the telling, which leaves me sitting here, sweating, in an air-conditioned room where the heat is winning, hammering away the keys.

This is the part where I tell you to read the two previous installments, so you know what's going on with the story to this point.

Part 1: How the Mighty Fall: Pride Comes First

Part 2: How the Mighty Fall: The Fall

Okay, now back to March, 2014.

Before the final straw that put me in the ambulance, I'd been surviving on utter hopelessness. I couldn't train effectively or really do much at all without abject misery. When I said earlier that I was in a zombie state, I was not exaggerating. For weeks I had not been present, but somewhere else entirely.

Now, in a hospital bed, my life was flashing before my eyes and I could not play out a positive outcome. Somehow I was able to hold still for the MRI. It was probably because of all the drugs I was on, but still, I had to focus on shallow breaths the whole time I was in that machine.

One of the things the doctor was explaining after he told me I needed surgery was that they had a really good quality picture on the MRI, which allowed them to be clear about what was going on and what needed to be done. The disc at L5, S1 had moved, significantly, in a direction which was causing serious impingement on a root nerve. At this point the disc had moved at least one and a half centimeters, in a troublesome direction. The attending physician was not a surgeon and explained that I'd have to wait for a specialist to come up with a plan of action, but surgery would definitely be required, immediately.

Through all of this, Tarra had been right by my side, talking shit every step of the way. That might sound odd to you, but she knows better than to baby me. I do not respond to that shit.

She needed to leave and grab some things at home, so I was left to my own devices for awhile.

I can still feel the waiting for the neurosurgeon to come. Every nightmare scenario you could imagine was going through my head, in vivid detail. I was hardly able to sleep, even with the drugs, which were strong, and what I did get of rest was bleak and dreamless.

When the neurosurgeon finally arrived, he looked dapper and was very well spoken, almost charming. Again, it might've been the drugs. But just the same, it was a relief that he appeared to have his shit together. It didn't hurt that he had the right answer to every question.

He'd been a neurosurgeon for 10 years, had been performing the procedures I needed for that long, and over 100 times in the last year. He said that for my situation there was about a 90% success rate, and out of those successful people, about ten percent would re-injure.

The injury was low enough on my spine that there was no risk of paralysis, so that was a plus. The procedures I needed were a laminectomy, possibly two, and a discectomy at L5-S1.

This news elicited a complicated package of responses in me.

Later I'd brood and let myself mourn, but I had to finish the course first. I pressed on and went through the list of points I wanted to cover.

In the myriad topics my questions did cover, one point was worth mentioning here. Would the feeling in my leg return and would my right calf begin to work normally again?

Somehow, in my recount of these events, I failed to mention that during my preparation for RUM I noticed my foot felt like it was asleep one day. After removing my shoe I realized it was totally numb, along with half of my calf and most of my hamstring. The only time I would feel anything in those areas, would be when I experienced burning agonizing pain. In the months that followed the initial numbness, the outer half of my calf atrophied a bit.

The doctor didn't have much of an answer for that one. After the surgery, he explained, the feeling might come back, altogether. It may return slowly, over a period of months. It was also possible that it would not return at all, ever.

It was a matter of how much damage had been done to the nerve, Given the circumstances, he did not want to speculate.

Once I'd asked all my questions, he told me I could not eat for the rest of the night and that they were going to perform the surgery first thing in the morning.

On his way out, he told me that I was not going to be able to lift weights like I did before. I just smiled and asked him to please do his best. The pain was unsettling and starting to control me; I could not argue with him just then.

Even if you could convince someone like me to stop lifting weights, you might as well try to talk them into smoking crack with you, because you are just going to fuck their whole life up.

I was going to lift again. He just needed to do his part, because I couldn't operate on my own spine. Arguing with him would not help my cause, anyway. I let him leave.

By now my stomach was completely empty and I was starving, but I didn't want to do anything to fuck up my scheduled time for the surgery. I could not handle another day of Tarra holding bedpans for me to piss in, so I behaved and didn't drink or eat. Besides, the nurse had just administered my IV medication and I was really fucking high on drugs.

The dilaudid, while it was helping with the agony, had me thinking some very strange things.

I thought my nurse seemed full of secrets and morbidly sexy.

I remember thinking about spiders after the surgeon left, also.

How would it be to live as a spider? Half warned by a presentiment that some ill would befall you, you'd throw a web up to the ceiling and immediately pull yourself out of danger. I'd seen them do this many times, with my own eyes. In those cases, I was the danger and the spider was escaping me.

Did a spider's prey have its own instinctive sense of danger when present, or was there no warning until already caught and struggling in the web?

I felt very much like prey at that moment and would've been glad to be the spider, breaking out of that scenario on a high speed web to hide in some air duct. But, no.

I had to see this through.

It was time to be a man and get back on my feet. In this case, that meant braving the unknown. I'd dealt with situations out of my own control before.

This was only to be more of that, and on a grander scale.

The odds were very much in my favor, but the 10% chance of the procedure not working was a jackal, ever-whispering in my ear. I resigned to the fact that I was powerless over the situation at that point, but held on to the idea it would not always be that way. Then I was able to fall asleep.

Morning came and I woke in a panic, with the hunger of a thousand lunatic Somali pirates.

Tarra was fast asleep on a chair beside my bed. I wasn't sure what woke me, but I was extremely awake and in desperate need of food or drugs or both. At very least the food.

Before long, the neurosurgeon's PA came in and informed me that my surgery would be delayed because the doctor had been called in very early to another hospital for a car wreck where there was a risk that the patient could be paralyzed and time was of the essence.

The physician's assistant was tall and attractive with chestnut hair and a face like a child. She didn't look like she could be in her late twenties but I assumed she must've been that at least. She went over some specifics about my surgery with me and was very respectful, with excellent bedside manner. I liked her and enjoyed her company.

Before leaving, she explained that I still couldn't eat or drink anything. I liked her a good deal less after that. The surgeon would be over to perform my surgery immediately after finishing the one he'd been called in on, or so I was told.

It was after the PA left that I noticed a message pop up on my phone from Facebook messenger. Now, it had become apparent in the last 24 hours that a lot of people in my area really care about me. I was getting bombarded with text messages and phone calls from people who wanted to come visit me. But this message was from someone local who I'd never spoken to. Her name was Marisa and she turned out to be one of the kindest people I've ever met.

This girl kept me distracted for a little while with messages about how she had spent a lot of time in hospitals in her young life, only now being in her early twenties. She was trying to console me the entire conversation, explaining that surgery was no big deal and she'd been through many. She'd read about my situation in a Facebook status. The whole interaction was baffling, because for the life of me I could not understand her motive for reaching out.

The morning and afternoon flew by in a narcotic fueled blur. But, the hunger was still torturous. That, combined with constant pain, drove a kind of synergy and it started to become more than I could handle.

Just as I reached the point where I was beginning to lose my temper and snap, the phone by my bed rang.

Tarra picked it up and handed it to me. It was my surgeon. He explained that he had been in surgery for almost ten hours and he would rather go home and sleep and come in fresh, early the next morning to perform my surgery.

"Does this mean I can eat now?"

"Yes, you can eat until 8 o'clock."

I hung up the phone without saying goodbye and turned directly to Tarra.

"Please go get me everything they have at Boston Market."

She did, and I ate it like it was my last meal. For all I knew, it could be. The hospital staff brought me a dinner tray and I ate that, too.

In the morning, I was rolled into a very large surgical suite and prepared to be to cut open. I spoke with my anesthesiologist and I remember having a brief conversation with him about platelet rich plasma. He told me that he didn't think there was enough evidence to support it at this point, but it was possible that it was effective. I was very high again, on a combination of drugs.

That is my very last memory before the surgery. The next thing I remember is talking to a very attractive Italian looking woman in her forties about when they were going to do the surgery. She held my hand and explained it was already done and then asked a nurse or someone to give me more medication.

I remember being wheeled back into my room, and seeing Tarra there waiting.

Now at this point I was drugged, but my senses were sharp. My limbs were tingling with nervous energy and I wanted nothing more than to find out how successful the surgery had been.

Almost immediately, the PA returned to see me and give me a brief examination. She touched my toes to see if I could feel it. I could not. If I could have hidden my disappointment, I would have, out of shame. I could not.

She moved right along and performed more tests. She lifted my leg in a way which prior to the surgery would've had me in tears. Nothing. No pain at all.

I could deal with a numb foot if it meant the pain was gone and I could start to recover.

The surgeon showed up while his PA was still in the room. He repeated the tests she'd just performed and then sat with me for a little bit to talk about my surgery. He explained that the portion of disc he cut out was quite large and that on a normal sized person it would have been a nice percentage of the total disc, but for me it was only maybe 10% and the other 90 was still in there.

On his phone, he had a picture of the portion of disc which he'd cut from my spine. It was in a stainless steel surgical bowl with a nickel thrown in for size comparison. He explained that he had to cut off a good length of the annulus of the disc, which is the tough edge that allows the spine to be flexible. The disc would have to heal and scar up and that scarring would work like a new annulus, though it would not be as good as the original.

It was very important to him that I understood the disc was fragile and the surrounding muscles had been pulled from the bone to open me up. Everything needed time to heal.

I promised to follow whatever restrictions or limitations he would give me for six months. I told him I would lift again after that and nothing was going to stop me, that I'd compete in powerlifting again within a year. He said if I did that, to get him some video for him to put on his website. We got along really well and he gave me his personal cell phone number and texted me a copy of the picture of my disc.

Do you remember in the opening paragraphs of this chapter when I said there was still a good amount of this story left? Well, there is still a good amount of this story left: enough for another chapter.

So I leave you unsatisfied, yet again. Don't tire of me. This time, at least, I leave you with hope. The road from Hell is long and dark, but there is light on the horizon.

The conclusion, I promise, soon.