Firsts

A few months before Mark died, I took a yoga class. For eight weeks I’d leave the house on Tuesday night, and as I was walking out the door Mark would say, “Have a good class,” just like I’d tell him to have a good ride on Saturday mornings. On the second to last class, I was doing a pose and felt a slight muscle pull in my lower back. The rest of the week I babied my back so as not to make it worse, but during the last class I did a pose where you leaned over touching your fingertips to the floor while raising your opposite leg as high as you could against the wall. Should I have done this with my back already hurting? No, but as one of the older women in the class I wasn’t going to sit that one out while those younger seemed to be doing it easily.

It only took a few days for that pulled muscle in my lower back to morph into sciatica that lasted for months. I went to a chiropractor who said in six sessions I’d be back to my old self. After twenty, meeting a deductible, and a lot of copays, I quit. I went to two different physical therapists, had a steady diet of ibuprofen, and after five months without much success, I was finally given a referral to a pain specialist. That appointment was scheduled to take place two days after Mark died, and it wasn’t until January that I rescheduled it. The doctor recommended a steroid treatment and I was so desperate I agreed to it immediately. I was told it wasn’t necessary to bring anyone with me and arrived late in the afternoon on an overcast winter day to a full waiting room. One by one patients were called back, and at one point a nurse asked me my name, my appointment time, and how long I’d been waiting. I gave her the information and she said, “Okay, I just noticed you’ve been sitting here awhile and want to make sure I have you on my patient list.” She left the waiting room and a man sitting directly across from me looked at me and said, “She waltzes in here after all of us and gets priority treatment. Looks like we have reverse discrimination going on here, folks. Guess it pays to be a woman,” and then he snapped the pages of the newspaper he was reading to emphasize that he really was a toxic jerk. I was so taken aback and finding everything about being there too hard that the only defense I could muster was to curl up in my chair in a fetal position.

I did get called back when it was my turn and not a minute sooner, and while the waiting room felt accusatory and ugly, the other side of the doors were frantic and stressful. The portable xray machine for the department wasn’t working and they had spent the day having to share the ER machine making everything backed up. The doctor came in and gave me a two minute briefing before I was wheeled into the procedure room to get multiple shots into both sides of my lower back. I should have been able to go home soon after but my blood pressure was too high to release me and I had to hang around waiting for it to go down. When I got the okay from the nurse that I could leave, I couldn’t get out of that place fast enough.

The next morning I woke up and had no side affects from the shots and no pain, my sciatica was gone. I was so happy and told everyone at work that they’d seen the last of me hobbling around the office with my bad back, and that lasted less than a week before it came roaring back. The doctor had told me that sometimes these shots work with one treatment, sometimes it takes as many as three. It didn’t matter to me. I managed my first health hurdle without Mark while being harassed by a stranger in the waiting room and I had no intention of repeating that experience again.

After death everything is a first-time hurdle and it’s unpredictable what will knock you flat. There’s plenty of warning for the first holidays, the first birthday, the one year anniversary of death, but there are other firsts that don’t come with a warning label. Mark and I were both passionately political from a young age, we followed it all whether it was local or national politics and we loved watching election returns for state races and the presidency. We always voted together, standing outside in a snowstorm for two hours for a presidential election when we moved here because the county didn’t expect a heavy turnout and there weren’t enough voting machines. I expected voting this past November to be hard without Mark, but there were so many volunteers yelling Covid protocol every thirty seconds that it felt like the security line at the airport and I just wanted to cast my vote and leave.

When inauguration day arrived last week and I watched it all day long like I always do, when night fell and Mark should be coming home from work and celebrating with me, when all of a sudden absence was the loudest sound in the room, I felt like a bird that flew into a plate glass window and slid to the ground in a stunned and shaken heap. All the excitement and hope that I felt earlier in the day set with the sun and it turned into a lonely winter night that I didn’t see coming.

It would be days later before it felt like I was returning to myself in a way that I have learned to manage. A new day in a new week presented itself with an unrelenting cold rain which seemed especially fitting, and every unwritten word about Mark’s death remains firmly planted up one side of my spine and down the other.