Adventures in neck pain

The autumn of my life was not a graceful transition, but an immediate grinding gear shift. One day I woke up, clocked in, and suffered a pretty serious neck injury that has never 'healed.' I think I was 26. The discs in my neck do not line up, are stenosed, arthritic, and desiccated. I'm no doctor, but I'm pretty sure those are all slightly different things; maybe they're the same though. I can't feel the differences day to day certainly. Since then, I've lived with some amount of daily pain muted through anti-inflammatory drugs (non-steroid and steroid) and muscle relaxers. Occasionally a doctor will shoot me up with something, but a cervical corticosteroid epidural injection is about as much fun as it sounds - the last time I was at the doctor's office on injection day, an older woman had a panic attack waiting for hers. There are surely worse medical horrors, but I would suggest this is an underrated one.

An injection like that might relieve the pain, but it does not combat the atrophy of my neck muscles, the weakness. The aforementioned issues have more or less withered the muscles in my neck, and made rebuilding them impossible. Maybe spinal fusion or disc replacement will alleviate the pressure on my nerves and enable any level of strengthening down the line, but those are major surgeries, and they do not help me today (or in the past). Unfortunately too, I hate how the muscle relaxers make me feel, so I've avoided them the last few weeks and replaced them with things like ibuprofen. Of course, I've done this in the past and the effects on my stomach were so dire the doctor insisted on a colonoscopy; I think I was 31.

While some haters would love to hear about how my shit stinks, I'm pretty sure it's a minority position. The point of this is this: It is very difficult for me to physically look at books on shelves for more than an hour or two. Not only that, the consequences of merely titling my head for an hour or two to read the titles on the spines linger for days. Now, a 'hack' for this is to take muscle relaxers the day before and the night after, but then I'm in a haze for two days and driving a car in that state is not wise.

There are some other hacks to, for sure: snapping pictures of the shelves and staring down at my phone, zooming in and out at the titles. This works alright, but if the spines aren't all neat and flush, some always end up in shadow, obscured. It's still probably the best 'low impact' way of browsing through the shelves. Unfortunately, this does not work for the poetry section: the spines are too small to read that way. End result is: I have to endure titling my head and sifting thru the poetry section.

Similar issues haunt the mass market and older academic book shelves for me too. Fundamentally, the spines are faded, difficult to read. Thankfully, with mass markets in particular, some places will have them in boxes on tables or the floor. This is easier for me to flip through, but still it takes its toll.

Not being able to browse endlessly though libraries, bookstores, book sales has been hard on me; it's one of my favorite things to do. The days of sifting through boxes of documents, bent over pages unread for lifetimes is behind me largely. I physically cannot do it in a way worth doing. I can do it for a couple hours on the weekend, as a treat, but systematically combing through places as I once did is now a memory of youth: the memories of having really good three man chemistry on the basketball court at summer camp with a couple kids from central Jersey has the same tinge as perusing a university library's shelves for the first time. Disability comes for us all, but the ways it arrives are totally beyond our control, imagination; capitalism is a mass disabling process that leaves me recovering from work at the end of the day instead of criticizing after dinner via the contents of some facility's bookshelves.

Like a lot of you reading this no doubt, I am sure you too find 'combing through the archive' an important activity. As much as I would like to do that kind of work, contribute to the reevaluation of certain writer's legacies or the search for hard to find mass market originals of forgotten genre writers, it is too painful (or chasing down their short stories in various magazines). I can still 'do the reading,' but the physical side of the equation is too painful. I can barely push a shopping cart!

Worse still, the amount of books libraries lock up in their closed stacks had grown the last few years. Even if I could socially engineer my way into some reading time, sitting in a library's uncomfortable chairs with no neck support for several hours is out of the question: those books are unavailable to me.

I know there's always ebooks but that's a different pain in the neck... might be the next topic.