Maybe I’ve been lying by omission, though radical transparency has never been one of my brand pillars so maybe it’s fine? In any case, I came here to disclose that I haven’t played tennis in four months. It has nothing to do with winter.
I have a herniated disc; a budget MRI ($250) I got in a moldy basement in Astoria told me so. If you’re a silly billy freelancer without health insurance like me, $250 is a very good price for an MRI (start here if you’re in New York and need one). The caveat is that the price was, for me, the only palatable thing about the experience. Permit me a quick, floral meandering wherein I dump my trauma upon you.
So, the basement. Once I descended there, a middle-aged Russian woman with translucent skin rose silently from her chair and glided toward me with the kind of frailty no-one wants from a health practitioner. Her glazed-over eyes were fully committed to the middle distance, making it unclear if she’d actually seen me or just felt that someone was there.
This woman led me to the machine—as much as an eerie, amorphous person can lead—mumbling and shuffling and come to think of it, probably sleepwalking. To be fair, she couldn’t have settled me with coherence or conviction. Swampy smells usurped my nostrils, meaning mold was nigh. Just basements upholding their rep, as it were! Cortisol soaring, armpits soggy, I thought only of how mold in my Bed Stuy apartment took me out last year.
She didn’t meet my eyes to hand me protective goggles, instead staring blankly ahead (shout out Vanessa Carlton) while I submitted to a thousand miles of ear-shredding tones that had me believing the year was 1998 and the locale was my family’s *computer room*—though the suffering lasted much longer than a dial-up modem connecting to the internet. Do we all agree that MRIs are insane?? Lmk.
It’s so true that everyone has a story and that was mine! The events described above culminated in a sobering fact: I have a herniated disc, which is when “the inner gel-like core of a spinal disc pushes through a tear or weak point in the tough outer layer” (spine-health.com).
Prior to knowing, I really didn’t want to know, so instead I played through tension and stiffness—and eventually, actual pain—for months. I can probably even trace the demise of my back to a recurring ankle injury from four years ago that returned last summer. I played through both chapters. What are signs for if not ignoring them?? There was pain; nevertheless, she persisted.
So let me just say that this is a hard thing to write about—not because it hurts to sit, and also, tragically, to sneeze—but because it reveals the mistakes and character deficiencies that got me here in the first place.
If you are maybe on the edge of an injury, here are three things you shouldn’t do that I did:
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