Okay, so I’m back. Now let’s make a long, bumpy (the ride) story rather…well…as long as it needs to be.
In 1981 someone dropped their end of a piece of rather large equipment and I ended up with a somewhat broken back–meaning I could still walk…after a fashion…with a lot of gritting of teeth. But because there was a war on at the time (for the US and Soviet Navy submariners there was anyway), I was allowed, with my skipper’s permission, to not only stay in the Navy but on my boat as well.
This injury had cocked my lower spine into a shape resembling a very shallow "S". Over the years, due to that S-curve in my lower spine, my hips began to cock in compensation or more rather in sympathy since the spine and the pelvic bone have been very close neighbors now for nearly fifty years. Despite one neighbor trying to help out another the end result for me was a right leg ending up close to 1-1/2 inches shorter than the left one. That plus the fact that I had been gimping around on this asymmetrical pair of legs unknowingly for at least 20 years or more as the difference in length increased really didn’t help matters much as you might understand.
Then I had 3 hernia’s fixed in one day. Just wait, that actually has something to do with this.
Eventually my hips began to complain while we were out on our daily evening walks. Then they began to complain more, even at work. They would complain by jabbing my hip area with all sorts of things that you might find in a Voodoo ritual such as knives, swords, a various assortments of hat pins and other such pointy tipped implements of destruction. Anyone whose experienced the beginnings of arthritis in their hips knows exactly what I’m talking about.
But that was understandable. The pain was located in my hips after all.
But 4 weeks ago I ended up with a severely uncomfortable sensation in…well, let me explain it this way. If one’s appendix was actually located on the left side rather than the right and one suddenly had an attack of acute appendicitis but turned down just a bit on the pain end of things–that’s what it felt like. In other words it felt very similar to when I popped a double hernia (called a "pantaloon") on my right side just over a year ago.
It got bad. So off to the VA I went.
The good news is that it wasn’t a hernia after all although they understood why I might have felt that way. The bad news is that my left hip seems to be becoming just enough worse to begin radiating pain into my lower left abdomen hence the hernia type pain I was experiencing. So there seems to be only one course of action to pursue now considering all the above…
Lot’s of prescription narcotics.
Then I can start another blog called the "Arrmmphh Buglrmmppf!"
Now wasn’t it worth reading this?
Tags: disabilities, Life as a veteran, vet
Post a Comment