Five years ago, I went under the gas to have my knee scoped. I was more nervous about it than I let on at the time, because anytime you black out, bad things can happen. Ask anyone who ever woke up on a frathouse couch with someone’s junk traced on their face. But ultimately, that was my knee, nothing to get too bent out of shape about.
Tomorrow, I will get my neck numbed and a huge needle stuck into my spine, to deliver steroids straight to an inflamed disc that is, to all accounts, the principle issue behind my ongoing shoulder pain these last couple of years. I am a little sensitive about anything to do with the spine, partly because of my dad’s issues and partly because it’s your goddamn spine. It’s the core of the nervous system, it’s where the action happens, it’s the next thing after the brain. It’s nothing to fuck with.
On the one hand, my chiropractor recommends this guy as being an artist at that sort of thing, that he’s had thousands of patients and never a glitch. On the other hand, there’s a rash of fungal meningitis back East owing to a bad batch of drugs from a compounding pharmacy (an outbreak that was identified by Vanderbilt University Medical Center after the first case popped up at another Nashvile clinic; Anchor Down). On the third hand, the scrutiny of drugs is going to be tighter than ever, which means whatever they give me will have been inspected and sorted properly. On the fourth hand, it’s a fucking needle in my spine.
I’m not freaking out, honestly I’m not. Of course it’s not happening yet. I’m very good at la-di-da right up until the moment that I’m confronted with not being able to feel my neck when they numb it. Hopefully they’ll have space to plug in an iPod or something else distracting while the action happens, but probably not. Price of doing business. A couple days rest and maybe this’ll be an end of it for a while…maybe a couple more years of normal function before it starts to twinge again. This is just the price of getting old.