Writer Grievously Injured Doing Housework

"I was making the bed. Who fractures their back making the bed?"

Okay, this wasn’t the bed-making injury, but it’s related.

I was going to try to learn Pickleball this week, but I got a reprieve because I messed up my back. It hurts when I sit, it hurts when I stand, it hurts when I lie down. Walking doesn’t always feel so great either.

What daredevil sport caused this injury?

I was making the bed.

I’ll admit I was a little wild.  I had that high you sometimes get from fresh sheet smell and I tossed the comforter with a wave-like flourish: Bend forward, lift with both hands, and flip. 

Then, as if we were partners in the bad back tango, I felt an echoing wave of pain shoot through my spine, and the muscles in my back locked. I try to listen to what my body is saying and what my body was saying was, “Get a cleaning lady.” I don’t have a cleaning lady, because I’d rather spend the money on a garage.  I could try to park my car on New York City streets, but then I’d spend my life looking for a spot and anyway, it’s a pretty car. I don’t want anyone banging into it.

I am 75. I hate to keep mentioning this, but I like to think that sometimes a new reader stumbles onto this site, and in this case it’s important.  That’s because – and forgive me for the medical jargon -- when you hit a certain age, the squishy filling that cushions your bones starts to erode and your bones rub against one another and next thing you know you have a speaking part in a documentary on the Sackler family. Also, your spine starts to compress, making you shorter and shorter, until you become the size of a hood ornament.

What’s that on the front of your Mustang, Caity?

That is Aunt Joyce, who gave me her car when she became too tiny to see over the steering wheel. Her age-related spinal compression was compounded by a tragic injury she suffered while making her bed. We begged her to get a cleaning lady, but she refused to park on the street. When the fog lies thick on the Merritt Parkway, you can hear her moan.

Normally, I am an age-related illness denier. I don’t want to believe that there is inevitable deterioration as one grows older.  I prefer to think of health as attitude.  You feel bad, get in a red convertible with the top down and you are as young as the car is shiny, as fresh as the leaves on the trees, provided you use this metaphor in June.  

Sports car engagement works for me most of the time, even with my molting white hair sticking to the upholstery, although putting the top down with the bad air out of Canada earlier this month was not a great idea. In half an hour, my throat was sore. I was taking a drive to meet a friend who drives a yellow Porsche. He hadn’t put his top down. When Porsche people are cautious, you know things are bad.

I can accept back injuries that come from doing something stupid. My first, when I was in my early 30s, came from yanking out weeds from a standing position. Today I know that you should never yank and, if you are trying to lift something heavy, like weeds firmly attached to their mother the earth, you kneel and tighten your core. The problem was, forty years ago, no one knew about the core. Now you hear about it all the time.

You’re going to Europe? Make sure you tighten your core before getting on the plane.

Buying a house? When you get the contract, be sure to tighten your core.

Yanking those weeds, I tore two discs. The pain that ripped through me literally made me see stars. Luckily, I have an old friend, Dr. Loren Fishman, who is a back pain specialist. In his practice, he often recommends yoga, with which I am psychologically incompatible.

In this case, however, he prescribed corsets and it turned out that the cute ones were just as effective as the ugly medical ones. I must have been feeling very optimistic about my love life, as I got both a white corset, with adorable little bows and ribbons and conspicuous snaps, and a black. I no longer have them, they got tossed along with the garter belts about the time I thought, “The hell with the props. Take me as I am, boys.” This may be another sign of aging.

My next bad injury, two decades later, resulted from colliding with a metal stanchion while biking along the Hudson River.

I’d felt my back slam into something hard as I went down; I remember being terrified that I’d broken my back and was paralyzed for life. (Yes, even in a split second, my mind flashes to the worst possibility. That is why I am a writer.) I could, however, move my legs so I quickly turned my attention to my arm, which was hanging limply from the elbow like a zombie’s and was shattered in five places. (I am not stoned in that photo in the back of the ambulance, not yet, I am in shock. )

It wasn’t until six weeks later, when I could finally stop taking the Oxy, that I became aware of the pain in my back and X-rays revealed a hairline fracture on my spine.

And now, I have messed up my back again.  

“It looks to me like you have a fracture at L-3,” Loren the doctor says, when he gets the X-rays. “A compression fracture.”

I hate to ask the question, convertible shiny, leaf-green nymph in summer that I am, but I feel I must: Could this be, like, age-related?

“Age-related and osteoporosis-related,” Loren says. “As you get older, the spine is more fragile.”

And it really came from making the bed? That’s my sports injury at 75 – housework?

“You messed up leaning forward and flipping the blanket up,” Loren says. “You put more weight on the front of the vertebrae and the vertebrae above it crunched it and broke it. It broke the bone right into the part of the other bone.”

My back will hurt for about six weeks, Loren says, but will heal on its own. Meanwhile, there’s a yoga pose he recommends called  Salabhasana, in which you lie on the floor and arch your back. That will help with the pain. Loren suggests arching my back a lot. He also wants me to do the Upward Facing Dog pose, in which you hold your hands on the floor and arch your shoulders.

I cannot tell you how much I loathe exercise with the word “pose” in it, but I suppose I will have to do it.

Meanwhile, if you’ve got the name of a good cleaning lady in Greenwich Village, let me know.