What Did I Miss?

While you were picnicking, Bob was doing drugs.

The Lincoln Memorial, Washington Monument and U.S. Capitol building are seen as the sun rises on Memorial Day in Arlington, Virginia.

On Memorial Day, like 17% of my fellow Americans, I was in the emergency department.

No heart attack or MVA. No stab wound, no beer overdose, no fisticuffs over a badminton dispute, no gasoline-on-the-grill fire, no trichinosis, no bagel misadventure, no lawn dart impaling. I was not injured tethered to hot-air balloons in a lawn chair. (We’ll see what Labor Day brings.)

I’m here, heavily sedated but nonetheless utterly immobilized, with back spasms — the third time in nearly two decades that I’ve been ambulanced to a hospital screaming like I was a full day in labor and only three centimeters dilated. Or like Nancy Mace when there is a camera and a mic within the same ZIP code.

“Oh,” you say, “a backache. Sounds dire. Ha ha.” Retract that, or I will hunt you down and pull your eyelashes out. With a Vise-Grip. Then I’ll say, “Oh, a new fashion look.” A full-blown back spasm is a gigantic group of muscles clenching like the fists of a toddler throwing a temper tantrum. It’s like 70 winches reeling in cables attached to your spine.

You know the expression “takes your breath away”? That.

So it was not a pleasant ride to the hospital. Every bump and turn in the road was unbearable. You know how the hero in every action adventure flick invariably gets shot in the shoulder, winces and then removes the slug without anesthesia and resumes saving the girl/world?

I chose Option A: screaming bloody murder in the ambulance.

It’s painful, but for me not novel.

My first was 55 years ago, while decorating the hall for some kid’s Bar Mitzvah reception. It’s a sensation of agony and helplessness I promise you never get used to. Unsurprisingly, as I’ve gotten older the episodes have come more frequently.

The first involving 911, 18 years ago, was sustained while heroically sitting on the living room rug with my now 24-year-old, then just 6, playing. You scoff, but after two hours of crisscross applesauce, leaning forward repeatedly to roll dice and move the little metal hat or cannon to glorify late-stage capitalism, I could feel my back tighten. And then tighten some more. All day long. By bedtime I couldn’t move an inch in any direction without agony. I could barely catch my breath. I sent my youngest daughter to my bed and over 15 minutes managed to reach the floor next to hers. When the paramedics arrived, there was no way I could get on their stretcher. Luckily, they were able to use her bed sheet as a hammock to carry me downstairs.

Her Disney princess bed sheet.

In the18 years since there have been two more ambulance calls, the latest on Monday. There also have been three episodes when I managed to drive myself, twisted like Richard III, to three Surprisingly Indifferent Emergency Care Centers. (They’re the best if you value convenience over quality medical care and the customer service niceties of a Popeyes.) The most recent time I sat moaning and shrieking intermittently in the waiting room as a guy was dragged in by colleagues with a length of rebar impaled in his face. He seemed to be in some discomfort.

The clerk looked at him and said, “Credit card, please.”

Ok, that was possibly a slight exaggeration. She may have requested his driver’s license. The salient point is it was quite a while before any doctoring took place. I myself, having duly registered and surrendered a pouch of gold coins, was relegated to the Screamers Section of the waiting room, assured that the doctor (who graduated near the middle of his medical school class at the University of the Galapagos) would see me “any day now.”

In fairness, we got immediate attention when my 7-year-old, now 40, broke her wrist playing soccer. She was crying sweetly, got seen quickly and was gently treated. Still, I was disconcerted by the strip-mall minute clinic’s logo, which proudly decorated the front door, the promotional literature and all of the forms. It was a patch of sinus rhythm, those up and down lines on an EKG readout. Thing is, after about two inches the cardiogram flatlined. That is a poor outcome and possibly counterproductive marketing. The child, in a cute psychedelic green cast, survived.

Where was I? I seem to have digressed. All the Valium and Dilaudid are playing havoc with my attention span. Not with my back muscles, alas, which scream whenever I shift my body position by even an inch. It took 24 hours of narcotics abuse to relieve 80% of the pain. On the plus side, I slept through 20 of them.

There is apparently nothing they can do to prevent the next episode. At the moment the spasm overtook me, I was doing stretch exercises that were recommended by the Mayo Clinic to strengthen my core and increase flexibility in my back muscles.

I know there was something else. Oh, yeah. Did Trump offer a Memorial Day message? I’m sure it was a balm for all Americans.