>As The Cookie Crumbles: Pain In The Ass

The thing about pain, hippies, is that it is all YOURS. Nobody else can tell you what hurts, how badly, or what helps or how much. It's like the old surfers' adage: You're the only one in that barrel.

If the complaints by MANY MANY Of my peers --the OLD hippies--are an indication, I am beginning to think there is an undisclosed, disabling epidemic of pain among the middle-aged people of Murka: Dozens of my correspondents have mentioned trials of enduring and trying to stop/prevent sciatic pain. Call it "PAIN In The Ass-Region." And I agree: It's a bitch.

I suffer sciatica in my right leg/hip/back. An attack starts with the sensation that someone it twisting a dull, rough-edged poker deep inside my right buttock. This pain persists throughout the entire episode, but it is augmented and intensified by other attendant discomforts: the numbness, and the simultaneous tingling that advances down the exterior of my leg, down to the ankle, where it seems to cut off sensation with my foot such that, if I'm walking, it seems that I am merely pushing some dumb peg ahead of me.

These sensations persist until I can sit down for a few--mebbe five--minutes. If lucky, I'm good for about half- to 3/4 of an hour before I MUST sit down.

Because of the location of the spot at which the discomfort ALWAYS originates--just about the center of my right haunch--I have always attributed it to the fact that, for most of 40 years, it was on that hip/haunch, in just about exactly that spot, where I carried my wallet...

Which, in the way of those things, grew thick--not with cash but with all those goddam plastic cards and ID. The fucker was as thick as a block of 2x4, sometimes. And just as hard and unyielding. And I casually sat on it, without much thought, until the damage was done...

So now, I'm on a sorta private crusade to persuade men to stop carrying their wallets in their hip pockets, cuz sciatica hurts like a sumbitch and doesn't easily go away, if it goes away at all. Call it "karma repair." Check it out...

I've linked a video which demonstrates ways to stretch one of the muscles the extreme tightness of which very often is implicated in the pain, the piriformis. I gather there's a surgical procedure, too. But I haven't looked into that much.

So I'll hobbling down now, and hope to see you at the beach. Bring accupuncture needles, Hippies...