Hyper-chondriac (11 page)

“Is searing hip pain one of the chapters in
He's Just Not That Into You
?”

Nancy suffers from circular thinking and, like her mother, can sometimes be a little on the nervous side. However, her mother had an excuse: she escaped from Germany as a child during the Holocaust. Nancy's defense: she used to live in Manhattan in the “model district” and had lost quite a few boyfriends to them.

“Can you get down the stairs?”

“I don't think so.”

This sucked! But in retrospect it was my fault. My hip hadn't just “suddenly” collapsed. It's very rare that anything “suddenly” collapses when there are no external forces. There are always warning signs. I just chose to ignore them. First there was a twinge in my hip, followed by a little more pain in the joint in some other poses, and then the final blow. It reminded me of the many times a girlfriend would break up with me, putting me in shock. These always seemed like random out-of-the-blue occurrences, but in hindsight a plethora of incidents led to the demise of the relationship and I was an idiot for not noticing at least ten of them.

By this time the class had completely emptied out and Nancy was trying to help me down the stairs.

“Ow!”

“I'm sorry, I'm not strong enough. I'll ask Billy.”

But he was already out the door having iced lattes with his bendy groupies.

“I think you're gonna have to call an ambulance.”

“Shit!” Nancy said as she waved her phone in the air. “My phone doesn't work up here. Sit on the top step and I'll run outside.”

The good news was that the paramedics arrived quickly. The bad news was, I was leaving my first yoga class on a gurney. My hips were strong enough to squat three times my body weight, but not powerful enough to balance me on one leg. Yeah, lifting weights had been an excellent use of my time.

As they loaded me into the back of the ambulance, Nancy was about to join me when I blurted out: “Wait! We'll get a ticket if the car's parked there overnight and then we'll have to take a cab from the hospital back here! Why don't you get the car and meet me at the hospital?”

“I hate driving your car.”

“Well, you're gonna have to.”

“Is the phone book in the backseat?”

Nancy's a shade under five feet two and claims that she can barely see over my Volvo's steering wheel unless she's sitting on the yellow pages. Which, frankly, I have a hard time believing. She's a mere three inches shorter than the Denver Nuggets' Earl Boykins and I bet he can drive an Escalade without even sitting on a napkin.

 

At the hospital, they took some X-rays and an MRI and it appeared that I had torn a muscle in my hip, although the doctors didn't sound all that confident in their diagnosis. They stuttered and stammered through their conclusions as they held the film up to the lit background.

For the first time since I tore up my back squatting six years earlier, exercising was out of the question. I could barely walk and couldn't even get my shoes on without Nancy. Once in a while, if I was particularly grouchy, she would pretend to leave the house without helping me with my Pumas. I was beginning to understand how my mother felt. When you're reliant on another person and semi-helpless, little things become big things and big things become all-encompassing.

 

I knew the only hope of regaining my independence anytime soon was physical therapy. I was already a PT vet. After an ill-advised fistfight during my senior year of high school outside Mr. America's Gym in an icy parking lot, the left side of my lower body was temporarily partially paralyzed. I wound up going to the same physical therapist as my mother (occasionally our sessions even overlapped) for a trio of three-hour sessions every week, as well as doing prescribed exercises at home on a daily basis. My diligence enabled me to avoid a back operation.

I'd also had physical therapy to rehabilitate a knee I had torn up in 1998. I'd purchased a pair of special sneakers with giant waffle-like pads affixed to the ball of each foot. The heel of each sneaker was suspended several inches off the ground and the purpose of the footwear was to build up your calves so you could “jump higher.” (In hindsight, when you've over thirty, unless you're in the NBA or Sergei Bubka, there's really no reason to “jump higher.”) Hours after my magic shoes arrived in the mail, I went to a local park to do the specialized exercises on the instructional video that accompanied my new high-heeled sneakers. I bolted across the outfield of a softball field doing drills: running sideways and crisscrossing my legs for a couple hundred yards, followed by a series of wind sprints. In under an hour, I tore my knee ligaments and had to crawl to my car. The shoes didn't help me jump higher, but they did help me not jump at all.

But this time my hip was so messed up (I believe that's the medical term) that my attempts at rehabilitation were pointless. I went to a nearby physical therapy center and even the simplest of tasks like riding a recumbent bike on the lowest setting proved too painful. I was sent home. They couldn't do anything until I regained some strength. Despite the excruciating discomfort, I can't say I was totally miserable. The pleasure of the impending healing process outweighed the pain.

 

As month after month drifted by and my hip wasn't getting any better, I needed to search elsewhere. I asked everyone I knew if they could recommend
anyone
who might help me.

My friend Stephanie referred me to her acupuncturist. I was totally open to the whole “sticking needles into your body” process. Hell, I was open to anything. But ten sessions, three hundred tiny needles and $1,200 later, my hip still felt like that of an unhealthy eighty-year-old. I came to the conclusion that the entire premise behind acupuncture is that when they pull all the needles out of your body you instantly feel much better because you no longer have needles in your body. It was time to move on to the next thing. A friend of a friend of Josh's came through with a name and a number.

 

I walked into a tall glass building covered with tinted windows and looked for suite 301. The Pain Foundation. I was expecting to enter the waiting room to a series of people moaning. “Ohhhh, we're in soooo much pain!!!! Ohhhhh!!!!” Part of me was wondering if there were any doctors there or just a series of dominatrices who would whip the shit out of you. I was somewhat disappointed when it looked just like the hundreds of other doctors' offices I had frequented.

My appointment was with Dr. Keith Pevsner, the Pain Management Specialist. Dr. Pevsner was a jolly, energetic man resembling Mr. Carlin from the original
Bob Newhart Show.

He looked at the X-rays and asked, “Have you ever had a cortisone shot in your spine?”

Hmmm…I actually had to think a minute for the answer.

“I don't think so.”

“Now, this
is
somewhat experimental, and your insurance won't cover it, but it probably won't hurt you…”

“Probably?”

“Well, you never know,” said the pain guy with a chuckle. Oh, he was a hoot.

I may be a hyper-chondriac but I'm no coward, so I agreed to the injection. But I did consider what the consequences would be if (a) the doctor had a mild case of Parkinson's and his hand slipped while injecting my spine or (b) an earthquake struck just as the metal met my vertebra. Still, I happily allowed a stranger to stick a needle the size of my spine into my spine, and it hurt like a motherfucker.

“Now, call me in a week and we'll see if it did anything,” said the guy holding the giant needle.

“Oh, it definitely did something.”

When I got home, my hip was killing me; I could barely walk, barely sleep and I was in agony while driving. Plus, on top of everything, my spine was tender.

 

A week later, I was back on a table at the Pain Foundation.

“I'm sorry that the shot in the spine didn't work. I thought that the origins of your hip pain might be in your vertebrae. Would you like to try some cortisone injected directly into your hip?”

He sounded so casual, as if he were my waiter reading off the lunch specials.

“Sure, why not?”

Again, this procedure wasn't covered by my insurance, but I really wanted to go on a nice hike again at some point before I was dead. This time the needle appeared to be the length of two stickball bats taped together. I turned away as Dr. Pevsner plunged what seemed like the entire thing into my bad hip.

“Jesus Christ!”

“Let's see if this does anything for you. Call me in a few days.”

 

A week later, there was no change in my hip. But there was a change in my bank account. All these tests and treatments were getting expensive. The shots alone were close to $1,000 apiece and Blue Cross wouldn't cover anything, so this was all out-of-pocket. These insurance companies really hold all the cards. When you're “unhealthy” you don't really have the luxury of shopping around for care and it seems only a narrow range of treatments are covered anyway. And when you're “healthy” you don't really think about insurance that much.

I returned to the painful confines of the Pain Foundation for a third time.

“Any relief?”

“Nope.”

“Okay, let's try some of this.” Dr. Pevsner removed a pen from his pocket, scribbled something on a pad and handed it to me.

It was a prescription for Celebrex.

“Now, be careful with these. Make sure to take them with food.”

I was supposed to take 400 mg worth of these white pills with yellow stripes every day. But even with a full meal, I could feel the pills quarreling with my insides. Each one felt as if it were ripping out my stomach lining. I thought it might be my imagination until I read on the Celebrex website that “…stomach problems such as bleeding can occur without warning and may cause death.” Of all the things that could kill me, I never thought it would be a yoga class.

 

Weighing a pill's potential side effects versus its healing effects can be tricky; the pain and inflammation in my stomach began to rival that in my hip. Would I need another pill to temper my stomach pain? Eventually, I'd have to take twenty different tablets every morning until I arrived at a side effect that was manageable.

Just taking a single pill got confusing at times, but juggling two seemed at least five times as difficult. Often I'd think I'd taken my 100 mg of Zoloft only to wonder whether that was actually yesterday, or if it was today but my Celebrex and not my Zoloft. I considered employing Nancy's sophisticated straightening-iron technique to help. Seconds after she leaves the house in the morning, I seem to always get a phone call.

“Did I unplug the straightening iron?”

“You always unplug the straightening iron.”

“Can you check, please?”

I always do and it always is. I asked Nancy what she does when I'm not home to confirm matters. She told me that in those instances she says “I'm unplugging the straightening iron” aloud to double the chances of remembering whether she did as she's driving away. It's only a matter of time before I'm yelling “I'm taking my Zoloft!” loud enough for the neighbors to hear.

 

A week after I started Celebrex and five months after my yoga mishap my hip began to feel a little better. My physical therapist referred me to hydrotherapy, since water offered less resistance than land-based exercise and was easier on the joints. The only trouble was, like my father, I couldn't swim. Yes, I've tried on numerous occasions. And no, you wouldn't be able to teach me, either. But thanks. During the summers, I'd stayed after camp to work one-on-one with a variety of lifeguard-like instructors without any success. Every girlfriend I've ever had thinks she can teach me to swim. Or at least float. They're all wrong. On our honeymoon, Nancy stuck her hand under my stomach in the three-feet portion of the pool, told me to relax, then released me as I hit bottom like an anchor.

Maybe drowning would solve my hip problem.

 

For six months I wore a life jacket and clutched a tomb-shaped piece of Styrofoam as I kicked my way across the width of the pool. My hydrotherapist, a curvy thirty-five-year-old named Tara, often had multiple clients at the same time, none of whom was under seventy-five. They often asked me what I was doing there.

“I mean, you look so healthy,” a wrinkled old woman (who was probably slightly less wrinkled when not in the water for long stretches) said. “What did you do to yourself?”

“I hurt my hip.”

“How, sweetie?”

“In yoga class.”

“Isn't yoga supposed to be good for you?”

“Yes.”

“I broke my hip thirty years ago and it hasn't been the same. Then once osteoporosis set in,
everything
hurt.”

“My shoulder's been throbbing since Korea,” said an older gentleman. “And my prostate is killing me!”