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2014—Failed Back Syndrome |
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…Previous medical event: 2014—Pulmonary Thrombosis
Some time in 2014, I was perusing my “chart,” which Tanner Clinic displays behind the “Patient Portal” to its web-site, and was startled to observe among my sizable list of diagnoses that of “Failed Back Syndrome,” without any accompanying diagnostic code or date of entry. It may have been there for some time, inasmuch as I don’t spend a lot of time poring over that record. It’s apparently common enough to rate an acronym (“FBS”), and Wikipedia’s entry on the subject associates it closely with the sequelae of back surgeries: maybe the failure inheres in the operations, rather than in the host back. Be that as it may, the label didn’t startle, nor did it seem at all implausible. It raised echoes of my original bad-back diagnosis a half-century earlier, complete with the Kaiser doctor’s counsel to “have a good life,” as well as Dr Svagr’s warning that I shouldn’t expect to be out of pain. |
| It also coincided—not coincidentally, I suppose— with the morning I could no longer ignore the fact that I no longer possessed the degree of balance that bicycling required. With tears, therefore, I hung Hepzibah in Chankly’s garage, there to remain and accuse me until the blessed and real coincidence in 2018 that accomplished my mutual rescue with the Badibangas. |  Bike miles, by year |
Not that I’d been without warning that incapacity impended. As the graph shows, I’d put 3,000 miles on Hepzibah pretty much every year of the new millennium, until it started tailing off pretty sharply in 2010. But it was never back trouble that kept me out of the saddle: the loss of balance was clearly progressive.
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| Updated Jul 2020 | [2014p02.htm] | Page 514-02 |