I have been so fortunate for most of my life as far as health goes – occasionally my back has given me fits over the years, but it’s been relatively minor, causing minimal impact on my day to day.  As I wrote in my last post, however, minimal is not how I would describe the impact of the current episode, which has kept me down for far too long – I was back at work a couple of days last week, and was, happily, able to make a planned weekend trip to Wichita for a special Grandma’s b-day weekend.  But the pain and the impact to my movement lingers, though overall I’m quite dramatically improved since July 24, when the episode began.

Yesterday after I returned from my trip early afternoon I played for the first time since I went down.  I was happy to discover that the range of motion required didn’t impact my back much at all – I stand while playing, and standing/walking are positions that work for me pretty well at the moment.  I would not be able to play while sitting at all, as even sitting while doing relatively stationary activities like typing remains difficult.

I do think I experienced a bit of heaven in my head while back at playing yesterday, a session that lasted about an hour.  Over the past ten days I’ve learned that pain really messes with a mind – my brain gets hijacked by it and begins to wonder if I’ll ever again be able to pursue my passions that require adept body mechanics – including karate and running. Yesterday’s playing helped me move past those fatalistic thoughts.

After doing my scales to get my fingers in tune I just decided to get back into the groove by playing all my songs through once, going through Suzuki Books 1 and 2 with the accompaniment tracks, then playing my new Book 3 songs through a couple times apiece.  I do think this longer-than-ever break helped me experience some of that learning in absentia that I’ve written about before.  My memory didn’t stumble much, and my tone was fine – I even think I felt a little looser while playing, I’m noticing that my fingers are moving more intuitively on the strings, for example.

I’m very much looking forward to this pain not being the most significant part of my day.  I’d like to think that might be tomorrow, but reality has me making incremental progress day by day.  At present I haven’t taken any pain pills in 24 hours, which represents some major movement indeed.

Thanks for reading.

Ryan