I just turned 60. OMG, I'm officially an old fart. What I didn't expect as I hit that milestone was that I'd be severally injured and disabled by that time. I've always been very healthy and taken care of myself. Where did that come from? Why did life throw such a curve ball?
I've been suffering chronic back pain for a couple of years now. Hard to believe it's been that long already. I've had back surgery 9 months ago and been trying to recover and get back to good health. It's been emotionally up and down for the last two years due to this injury but I focus on doing what I can. Just like this pandemic we're in, this back injury was a huge shock to me. Suddenly all my plans changed, can't travel, can't exercise, can't run, can't hike, can't do adventures....If I think about it too much (I do often), it gets me down and depression sets in. The recovery hasn't gone as planned. I was improving but the numbness and chronic pain seems to have returned to my dismay.
I do feel fortunate that I am somewhat mobile although my endurance is crap. I can do some light exercises like biking, walking and swimming. My doc and PT advise me to give up running, hiking and racing. That really saddened me. Although I was not great at it, I loved running, I loved hiking, I loved adventure, I loved the big outdoors, I loved racing. I loved the training, setting goals, pushing myself to new levels, I even took pride in all the sacrifices to get to the start line. Racing even scared me to a large degree. Testing your body to do things that are hard to do and race against others. On the day of the race, seeing if all the training sacrifices paid off. It made me feel alive!
I am on work leave hoping to get back to work so I can properly finish off my career. While on leave, my goal has always been to get healthy again so I can resume "life". I am working with a good medical team to help me get there. However, I need to do the "heavy lifting" to get back to health. To do that, I needed to resolve my lower back chronic pain as much as I could personally do. One of the recommendations my doc told me was to lose some weight. Now that it's fall, it's going to be even harder to lose weight, I always put on 10-15 lbs every fall. In the spring/summer, I exercise so much that I always lose that weight.
I need to make Getting Healthy, my job. I need to really focus on my diet. I need to be smarter with my light exercises, I need to get better sleep, I need to get better educated, to be smarter, I need to make getting healthy my job. Even though I'm a couple of years into this journey already, as part of helping my mental health, I will journal and blog my journey.
My new Health Office:
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