I've been wrestling with my back issues since my late teens, and a big factor in dealing with them has always been my age. It's one thing for an older person to have aches, pains and difficulties, but quite another for an adolescent. There's a greater urgency to try different ideas, both on the part of the patient and the medical community.
But nearly 25 years have passed since the first time my back went out, and it's getting harder to differentiate between ongoing conditions and the afflictions that spring up naturally (for lack of a better term) in middle age.
I feel like I'm starting to blend in to the great mass of middle-aged and post-middle-aged, where my issues aren't that much different from those of the guy next to me. It's not as if I felt somehow special when I was younger, but I got this sense that because I had more life left, there was more to be done. More avenues to explore when it came to managing the pain and the problems. More, as I said, urgency.
When I step back from this issue and look at it without the inherent self-pity, it occurs to me that the way I'm feeling about my health problems going into this stage of my life is a microcosm for my feelings about midlife in general: inevitable, with new pains and new promise, and probably the biggest pain in the ass since puberty.
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