17. Hurt, Hospitalized, Hopeful, & Healthy

Well I started the new job, my wife was home taking care of our new born son, our daughter had entered elementary school, Oyaji and Ba-chan were being their usual selves and life moved along.

One of the responsibilities of my job was assisting our elderly patients in and our of the bus or vans that we used to transport them back and forth from the hospital.  One rainy day I had stopped to pick up one particular patient, with the nurse that was along to assist with the patients while I was driving, and this petite elderly woman who had to ride in a wheel chair, was waiting under the eaves of her house with her daughter waiting for me to come and pick her up.

Usually she would walk slowly to the bus, and with assistance, climb up the stairs and get into the bus for the ride.  Yet due to the pouring rain she would have been soaked, even if we held umbrellas over her, the wind and rain were so bad that we decided it would be better for me to pick her up and carry her into the bus.  I put my arms around her, she couldn't have weighed more than 80 or 90 pounds, lifted her up, turned to carry her into the bus and I felt something pull in my lower back.  I had carried countless numbers of patients previously and never felt anything like that before.  Yet I was able to carry her into the bus and continue my usual route, but my lower back was killing me.

I got back to the hospital and sat down at my desk, continued with my work just thinking that I had maybe strained a muscle.  How wrong I was.  Over the course of the next few days the pain got worse and my boss had mentioned to me that it seemed to him that I was leaning over to one side and walking at an angle, he told me to go and see the doctor for a checkup.

Long story short, I was admitted to one of the other hospitals that I worked at.  I had seriously wrenched my back and they found after an MRI exam that I had a hernia.  I was in the hospital for a couple of weeks, went back to work feeling pretty good.  But that was just the start.

For a couple of years I had repeated problems with my back that just kept on coming up and ended up when our son turned 3 or so, back into the hospital needing major back surgery.  I was hospitalized for over  3 months and out of work for 6 months.  I had fusion surgery on my spine and 6 bolts inserted into my spine to assist in holding the spine in place while the bone grafts that were taken from my hip fused.  I still have the bolts and rods to this day.  I lost a ton of weight too, I had dropped down to about 180 pounds and looked like death warmed over.  The surgery itself lasted over 8 hours and I ended up needing 4 pints of blood, during the surgery.  I also ended up with a severely pinched nerve in my left leg that took longer to heal than my back.  I couldn't feel anything for months in the front half of my left upper leg.  You could put an ice cube on my leg and I never knew it was there.

Fortunately my health insurance covered nearly all of the costs and because it was a work related injury I received workmen s compensation which helped to cover the bills of the hospital and at home.

The healing process took quite a while, but eventually I got back to work, and nearly 8 years later I had to go back into the hospital to have the bolts and rods taken out because they ended up fracturing bones in my spinal column.  I am fine today, and have no complaints but am ever wary of having any problems with my back.

I also realized that being healthy is something I pretty much always took for granted yet after this experience showed that I had to be grateful for the doctors, nurses, and hospitals for all their assistance and help.