Kings Canyon...for a Day
“...the mountains are my life. Without them I am nothing.
They are perhaps the only reality I know. They are my guru.
If I am to learn anything in life, I will learn it there.”
—Randy Morgenson, qoute from his journals
The mountains are not my life. Sorry Randy. But if you have the opportunity to walk a few miles, or 6, or 8 into his house, KIngs Canyon and Sequoia National Parks, it's possible to get an inkling about what Randy was talking about. For 27 seasons Randy Morgenson performed the duties of a back country ranger for the National Park Service. He grew up in Yosemite and learned photography from Anzel Adams. His outlook on being a naturalist perhaps the most unknown yet most prolific of them all. What does this have to do with my back pain? Well I did walk a few miles in Randy’s shows…just a few short weeks ago. I flew to Fresno for a meeting, and took a quick jaunt up to Kings Canyon and Sequoia National Park to commune with, what I thought, would be the Giant Sequoias and Coastal Red Woods of the region . And yes I did, the Giant forest was tremendous and I got to see first hand, the grandeur of both the General Sherman and General Grant Sequoias. Did not see Sassquatch…but was looking extensively. Beyond the trees and what came as an unexpected surprise was hiking to the top or Moro Rock, a pure granite out cropping and then hiking in a valley from Logepole into the top of the crease where the waterfalls are making their way down from the melt off on the higher peaks, one of which is named for Morgenson. I made the whole trip, didn’t fuck myself up, and no one had to medevac me off the mountain top. My hiking buddy, letting me know he wasn't going to fireman carry me out of the valley so I better keep my shit together. What I witnessed was the grandeur of one single valley and one amazing peak to rival any of the soaring granite in Yosemite. I had no idea.
I was tired but the hike isn’t what get’s you, it’s the coast to coast flights in seerage with your legs folded up your ass that really wears out your back. I've had the opportunity to fly West this summer multiple times. I love to travel. I love the destinations because we're doing really good stuff. I do the right things. I sit in the aisle, I get up, I walk around but it still takes a toll on your back.
After the trip to Fresno I was back again quickly for a week in Las Vegas. This was a business trip too requiring multiple lectures and a lot of standing. The convention itself you're probably on your feet 10 to 14 hours. By Friday my back was crushed again.
But to really understand what's going on my back requires looking over the lifetime of abuse. In the '90s when I was racing motorcycles for fun, my short two seasons of racing resulted in over five crashes. One of them high side if you know what that means. Not wanting to go to the hospital because I was running a company and if you've ever seen the movie, “Along Came Poly” you know you can't get life Insurance if you're a base jumping, alligator wrestling, volcano luging, guy named Van Loo. So you just take your medical care off the grid. In this case I was seeing an osteopath who was putting me back together. Doubtful anyone remembers the days in the Pentagon when I could barely walk and would hobble in and take my place at my Silicone Graphics Computer to play my trade. I was in my twenties.
I continued to play soccer when I hung up the motorcycle racing but back then we didn't have the artificial fields and if you've ever fallen on a Virginia grass field it's no picnic. Not much grass. I had lower back problems and upper back problems…every few years I'd go to my guy he'd give me a pack of prednisone make a few adjustments and I was back on the field.
That is until about 2012 when I took a hit from the side which snapped my neck violently. The victim in this crash was my C5 and C6 vertebrae, crushing the soft disc in between. On this trip to the ER doctor the said not going shy on opioids and I was immediately given the juice in the form of intravenous Dilaudid. The pain I was feeling evaporated immediately. Also the MRI was much more liberal. Being stuck in the tube with Dilaudid makes that adventure far more palatable. I even opened my eyes a time or two…but that was a stupid mistake and I closed them quickly.
The MRI was conclusive that I had hurt those discs and was immediately referred to a neurosurgeon. Even back then he was not going to jump right in. So it was off to the pain doctor to get the standard cortisone epidural. Sure enough I was out of pain immediately but it was nothing to write home about because the epidural wore off within 2 weeks and I was back for more. The second injection lasted only 4 days and I was back in pain. I walked into my doctor’s office with my left hand hooked above my head. This is the standard call out for “I need my surgery and I need it now”. The doctor had me on the books within the week. I did want a second opinion and a third opinion and the fourth opinion…so I want to a very elite orthopedic spinal surgery to recommend that I get my C56 but he also my C67. The top one would be a new articulating joint so I could maintain my mobility. I thought it weird that I met with their financing director first. Another doctor wanted to go in the opposite direction and simply use orthoscopic to trim around the offending discs to reduce the herniations. Yet another doctor only wanted me to go into traction.
Just like now you don't want to jump at the surgery willy-nilly…It is important to try the most conservative care first, so I went into traction. After two servings of traction I was out of pain. What kind of an industry is this where the medical opinions I received run the gamut from conservative traction to multi-level spinal fusion? With absolutely no handle on which medical advice to take we have yet another scathing review of how far the medical industry has taken us down the toilet.
So currently I'm willing to give this rehabilitation and conservative PT a try. The surgeon at the hands of all this wants me to give this a try for 4 weeks before we take another look at surgery. I don't know why he thinks I want to hang around in pain for 4 weeks, learning about life in a wheelchair, just so his conscience can be clear about something that makes no sense. He seems Incompetent at best malicious at worst. I have never talked to this guy making these decisions about my medical care. Not a good look.
So a lifetime of abuse of my back has led to me paying an osteopath out of pocket to put me back together, looking for other solutions to back pain such as inversion machines, and just good back hygiene such as never reach into the backseat of your car from the front seat to retrieve your briefcase. There are many pearls of wisdom when it comes to protecting your back. The classic book by Sarno also on the list of things to do.
Fast forward to the summer of 2024, and I'm heading out on a 7-hour drive to give a 3-hour lecture. I can feel my back was a little tight and the smart thing to do would have been to go back in the house and get inverted on my table and maybe buy a little time back on the drive. When I got to my destination my back was really tweaking.
Pushing myself out of the car I knew something was different. I stood up with pain no longer in my back. It was shooting down my leg. I didn't know it at the time but I was having my first bout with sciatica.
Throughout the next year I continued to travel extensively and continued to deal with this new lower back issue. I was always able to get myself into relief by pushing into a position, stretching my back, and taking a step forward. Always good and off I went. When the pain was particularly uncomfortable I would take a handful of Motrin and Sally Forth. I would visit my old friend the osteopath he had the standard treatment available which included a kind adjustment, prednisone, In the good kind of NSAID called diclofenac or voltaren, the creme you can buy over the counter. If you take oral Diclofenac it's a clever type of Motrin that doesn't tear your stomach up as much. Switching to Motrin, however, I became wedded to Pepcid to calm the burning in my stomach. The 400 mg of Motrin just didn't get the job done so I was pushing back up to 800 mg. But we used to call Vitamin-M back when I had a young man's stomach.
Snow came early in the valleys and mountain passes of the Sierra Nevada and Christmas came early in the Rockies. I found myself yet again back out west on business. This time in the High desert of Nevada. It was here II would fight my first battle with pneumonia. Laying in a remote bed In a particular remote area of the country I took a deep breath out and heard the snap, crackle, and pot of having breakfast cereal in my lungs. Oh great I thought, I really did it the time. Not wanting to be an emergency evac victim out of the middle of nowhere, a stunt I would no doubt hear about for the rest of my life, I choose to hang in for the next 14-hour day. And then the next one, And then the next one. After that I fled the state on the next flight out, landing about 1600 local just in time to drive up to Urgent Care to have a look see at what was happening inside my lungs. This time I was handed not just another round of prednisone, I was giving antibiotics, and a fat inhaler of albuterol to clear up the infection in my lungs. Having read the book by Sarno about the proper way to care for your back, I had discovered some of the psychosomatic nature of back injury and put forth to running to keep everything aligned and in adjustment. This was no longer possible in the middle of December when you're flat on your back with pneumonia. So of course sciatica returned for me. It was Christmas week 2024.
Eventually my lungs cleared up and I was able to get back to you running and trying to care for the growing pain in my lower leg.
This time I would visit my primary care MD and have him him put in the prescriptions for prednisone and the new medication gabapentin. As it turns out prednisone and gabapentin are also two very good medications when you are taking care of an elderly German Shepherd Dog with back pain issues. And by the way the prescription strength of the two medications were precisely the same as the ones my primary provider had written. 25 mg prednisone, 100 mg gabapentin. Coincidence? I think not.
Rolling into the spring I was back in the pink, feeling strong and ready to rebuild what I had been losing. Playing soccer became my number one priority. Getting back to the field provides both fun, exercise, and the necessary cocktail of energy when you're in the zone and flooded with endorphins.
Complete happiness was always just one Sunday morning away. I also added a weekday game in the over 50 league. Havi gone over 60 years old in December shortly before experiencing my first bout with pneumonia, I had pushed 10 years past entry into the over 50 league, I was no longer a ringer.
Wanting to get back to your former player status but having taken one on the chin through the winter and summer months I was 40 lb above my target weight for maximum performance on the field. Flooded with advertisements for next gen GLP-1 products on the internet I eventually succumbed to the vanity of losing weight with a simple injection. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the GLP-1 revolution. After being cleared by the online GLP-1 army of Internet medical doctors, I received the product and it went to work. Oh did it work. Weight drop seemed like it came overnight. The side effects of the first generation product, was just a brief misstep in history.
The new side effects were brilliant. Enhanced memory, appetite suppressant, and a boost of Vitamin K12, mixed in with the compounding. I was shedding weight and within 6 weeks had lost 25 lb without even breaking a sweat. I found myself hating carbohydrates and craving chicken with a green leafy substrate I wasn't familiar with.
The effects were physical but they were also mental. I had discovered the Fountain of youth. I committed to playing more soccer and pretending I had reversed the hands of time. I was clearly in my 20s again. Three more trips out west were shaping up and I was ready to go. My health had returned over the spring and summer and I was as strong as ox. Not really, but I pretended. The first trip I have already described, and it involved actual hiking in the mountains in Kings Canyon in Sequoia National Forest. The second trip put me back in Vegas for a convention and the lecture circuit. My lectures tend to take 4 hours on my feet these days. My first lecture, which was on Tuesday, I stood for four and a half hours before I told the audience I was done and walked out headed for the bar. On Wednesday, I stoud about 4 hours as well, before tapping out and telling the gathered listeners that I was once again headed to the bar. It was of course Vegas, And what happens in Vegas should, of course stay there.
The following day was the convention, but I set up other meetings requiring me to drive places and meet people. I made it back for the convention and decided to change out of my sensible foot gear, the hiking boots I had worn in the mountain passes of California and high deserts of Nevada into sandals more familiar in the Berkeley regions of California. Standing at a convention in Birkenstocks my back would pay the price. After drinks that night I was back in my hotel wondering if this time I had screwed the pooch.
At about 3:00 a.m. I knew I was going home and adjusted my ticket on my mobile app to leave the following afternoon. The return flight in steerage to the east coast, made easier by an available asile seat. I was back in my own bed by 9:00 p.m. I rested up and was looking forward to playing soccer on Sunday morning having originally decided that week that I had planned to stay in Vegas and would missing that Sunday morning game. Happiness was on my mind.
As I stepped out onto the putch Sunday morning I noticed I was nursing a slight tightness in my left Achilles tendon. But that's insufficient for me too abandon the game that I love. When I stepped off the field and hour and a half later I was feeling every day of my 60 years along with the rush of every endorphin the human body can produce. “I am, I am, I am, Superman and I can do anything.” REM, circa my 20’s. Assholes.
But my day was not over, I needed to spring over to the office, for a quick check in on things, since I had been gone back and forth to the West Coast literally the past two previous weeks. After that I promised one of my best friends from the '90s that I would help him begin his move to a foreign land. That move required shifting around many large boxes and the movement of two large beds including headboards footboards and mattresses. Remember that REM song? Not true.
By the evening I was crushed, My back was sore,but I was alive. The normal work week would follow and I continued with my normal vibe of stretching, pushing myself into comfortable back positions, and pretending I was indeed, Superman. My fatal mistake did not occur until Friday.
During the week fortune was bestowed on my vanity as I was offered a job to be a bigwig. The immortal words spoken by the great fighter pilot and and strategic thinker, John Boyd, resonated in my ears. “Do something or be someone”. I gave always chosen to do something, But the offer to be someone was overcoming my lesser brain.
On Friday I did something I've never done in almost a decade of doing something, I put on a suit, tie, belt, and a pair of dress shoes. Match the belt to the shoes. Match the suit color to the shirt and tie in a two to three ratio. Two stripes one solid never three stripes. Etc. The dress shoes was the mistake. Wearing a new pair of dress shoes I had never worn before, I walked throughout the day to various meetings and places. By the evening my back was not only sore, it was tweaked badly. My stretching was providing no relief for the pain in my back as well as the leg pain creeping down from the top.
I figured, in the morning, I would get in a run, and put into adjustment anything that I had knocked out of adjustment that week. When Saturday morning arrived I couldn't even get out of bed. Pain had returned to my lower back, and there was no relief in my leg from the stretches I had learned were the best for sciatica. In particular the number four stretch where you bring your knee up and cross your leg over your other knee. Eventually that morning I was able to stretch myself upright, the position I would maintain for the rest of the day. When I sat down on Saturday night to watch a movie, I would never walk again. At least I haven't ambled about as a member of a biped species, since that evening. I remain hopeful.
In the morning, it would be time to call, 911. My mountain climbing days and dreams of yor had come to a sudden and very painful end. Had I'd been a member of the Donner party, hiking through the snow-filled passes of the Sierra Nevada mountains, in the winter of 1846, I would have been first on the menu.