Mono Monday: Strength

"Oh, grow a backbone, for heaven's sake!" *

This is a relic of a previous existence, kept partly as a memento of an important time in my life, and partly because I still think that the human spine is a wonderful piece of natural engineering. It's also quite remarkably strong: though evolved to allow us to adopt an upright posture, it was not designed to withstand the added stresses that we tend to place on it through our modern lifestyles - and yet, with a little care, it can be persuaded to cope for many decades with all of the bending, twisting and slumping that most of us subject it to.

Having said which, if this were my spine it would be a great deal less tidy than this plastic model. Mine has several oddities, one congenital and the rest acquired across half a century, the most noticeable of which is a bony enlargement in the middle of the lumbar curve - the result of a mistimed back-flip from a ladder. Before anyone suggests it, I wasn't drunk at the time: I had a Senior Wobble while painting the upper surface of a window embrasure, overbalanced and fell backwards across a portable radiator, landing flat on my back on the floor. Staying there didn't seem like an excellent option, given that there was no-one else at home and the nearest phone was at the opposite end of the house, so I elected to decide that if I could get to my feet and walk (which I could, just) the damage couldn't be too very bad. I managed, slowly, to get into bed and sleep. The following day I levered myself upright, applied heavy elastic strapping, downed enough pain killers to fell a horse, and spent the day helping my mother move house.

I'm not in the habit of discussing back pain with doctors - they have enough to do as it is - but in the course of a chat with my GP a couple of years later I mentioned this incident, and was promptly packed off for an MRI scan. By the time I received a copy of the report it seemed a little late to be having a fit of the vapours at the words "healed fracture of L3", and Mum, bless her, was no longer around to be regaled with the story. I did manage to make use of it a few weeks later though, when CH also fell off a ladder and broke his ankle. As I was driving him away from A&E he said, "Have you ever fractured anything?", and I replied, "Only my spine." Which I think you'll agree made the whole episode worthwhile.

Many thanks to Chantler63 LRPS for hosting this month. I'm curtseying here, by the way!

* If anyone should ever say this to you, may I suggest that you don't point out to them that this is biologically impossible, which might seem childish; or punch them in the face, which might escalate the situation. My advice would be to ask them, calmly and reasonably, what they were hoping to achieve by saying such a thing, and to tell them how it made you feel. If that doesn't work you still have the punch in the face as a fall-back option.