2005 and later—Ailments!
Parenthetically, let me point out that I haven’t cluttered up this account with boring details of my encroaching physical disabilities. Aren’t you glad? It’s largely because, thank the Lord, they’ve taken a long time to encroach. Apart from a lifelong inability (or disinclination—you choose) to dance and occasional acute episodes of spinal and (elsewhere)neurological pain, I’ve been blessed to be able to ignore them and to work around them. About 2005, though, they became increasingly non-negligible, and so maybe this is a good point in the chronology to insert a mini-Jeremiad on the subject.
P8941w
Fusion hardware, installed January, 2008
Aside from the dancing bit (which may yet prove purely attitudinal) and an enduring dislike of team sports (for which I may correctly credit my dear Pappy), the first suggestion of back trouble that I recall arose when I was sixteen, enrolled at Pacific High School, and working part-time for Cliff Nielsen at his pharmacy in San Bernardino. Went out to his white 1956 Chevy pick-up with a pile of prescriptions to deliver around town, reached forward to turn the ignition, and discovered that I couldn’t reach it. And that a simultaneous lightning-bolt of pain hit the small of my back, leaving me alarmed and immobile for some moments.

When the pain subsided, I made my way to the Kaiser-Permanente group medical practitioners we infrequented as a benefit of Pappy’s employment at Valley College. They took x-rays and delivered what has turned out, apparently, to be an accurate diagnosis: degenerative lumbar spondylolysis, apparently hereditary (or at least not resulting from any known injury or malformation). In English, my otherwise well-behaved vertebrae tend to flake off little sharp bits which migrate to the base of my spine, where they work mischief upon the nerves that control my legs. “Have a nice life,” said the Kaiser minions: there’s really nothing we can do.”
From time to time through the following decades, I’ve “thrown my back out.” Most recently and most memorably, during an early visit to our Keokuk descendants, I was trying to help move an armoire down the main stairs and wound up going to the john (and elsewhere) on hands and
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Such a Life
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Chapter 5
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2004
2005
2006
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