MyTimeToBlog
It's 6:30 AM and I'm stepping into my beat-up Fila sneakers. The roar of the exhaust fan is swallowing up the early morning conversations as I descend the metal staircase. In the day room, I'm finding the flat screen TV on PBS; an older woman was teaching sewing techniques. I marched to the kiosk, where Popeye was downloading today's newspaper on his tablet. I asked who was next? He disclosed that it was Rahmutu.
I waved to Rahmutu across the day room, who knew I needed to get in line for the kiosk to check for my emails from family. He said I followed him, then I began my arduous trek through my sciatica workout. This debilitating pain has plagued me for nearly two plus years. This time I knew what I needed to do to work the problem: cat stretches that had the men chuckling as I grimaced with my backside in the air, twisting it left and right. I never cared about the chuckles; all I cared for was healing my body.
I'm a workout fanatic, but since sciatica entered my life, I'm only limping around the recreation yard. My body hasn't lost its muscle mass, because calisthenics has helped me keep my shape...with a growing belly. Hey, nobody who's been in prison for nearly thirty years can say they're The Rock. Our bodies live, eat and sleep on steel and concrete. We all have physical issues that we gotta deal with.
My friend Haneef looked like the reincarnation of Carl Weathers. Muscles and a workout that broke most men, but now he's dealing with shoulder issues. The kind that I gotta chastise him for trying to bench press hundreds of pounds into the air repeatedly. He didn't listen at first, but he does now, because the pain has him sleeping with a brace to protect his shoulder.
Our bodies weren't meant to live constantly on concrete and steel. That's why I'm meeting more men with physical issues. They're the men who have been incarcerated for 20-30 years. I'm meeting them because I've seen their struggles with climbing stairs, limping around everywhere, and grimacing when they bend forward. So now we're having group chats on what works for our bodies and what doesn't?
My mother knew about my issues with sciatica, so she mailed in a workout book to deal with it. I'll be honest, when I first started dealing with sciatica, I was overstretching. God in heaven, did I go wrong with that one. Inflammation had me begging for high-end painkillers. It took me talking with my group chat, learning about overstretching. Once I discovered what I was doing to myself, I took a step back--a big one.
Some days, when I felt a moment of normalcy with my body, that was when I thought I was healed. I'd rush outside and get the idea to do burpees. As soon as I dived forward, wham, the pain rocketed back, and I'm on my knees, grimacing. I limped back into my housing unit, being seen in apparent pain. The men in the unit would come at me with painkillers. I didn't know what they were; I just wanted to feel relief. So, I popped them, two, three, and four at a time.
Being incarcerated, you gotta place a medical request form in the mailbox and wait. The pain doesn't go away. It's always there, so when I'm sitting and waiting on a call to Medical, I'm heading from one cell to the next, asking for a pill. This wasn't a good thing to do, because it masked the problem, giving me relief temporarily. So, when I decided to invest my money in Tylenol: Extra Strength, I ended up with my own Rite Aid in my locker. As I ate them by the handful, I learned about what they were doing to my liver. That bothered me, so I stopped taking them and suffered through the pain.
I did finally get to see a nurse. They prescribed me aspirin until I saw a doctor. I never took them because having liver failure scared me more than my sciatica. So, when I saw the doctor finally, he checked my medical records, asked questions, then had me get an X-ray of my back. Nothing showed up on the X-ray, so he suggested stretching. I shook my head, then headed back with the pain of the sciatica screaming at me.
Since I've been dealing with sciatica, my mood has me down in the dumps. I'm angry because this pain won't ever leave me. It scared me early on, because I became used to the pain, so some days I'm able to bend forward when brushing my teeth in the morning, other days, I'm bending my knees, trying not to stand straight because the sciatica would let me know it's always there.
The men who had surgery for their sciatica were all smiles. I envied them, because they're not dealing with the constant pain like it's a bad relationship that didn't want to break up with you, even when you yelled for it to get the hell out. I asked those men what they did for the doctor to send them out for surgery? They complained that nothing the doctor suggested worked. This took years for that to occur. Years! I'm two years in and what the hell does two more years mean with sciatica? Screw that.
This had me thinking crazy, and that's when I decided to focus on the stretches from the sciatica workout book. Every morning, I'm on my knees doing all kinds of stretches that had men asking me did they help my sciatica go away? I smiled because the pain was slowly going away, so I replied, "Yeah, they worked."
My smile was bright. I'm talking like the sun in your face. Dealing with sciatica in prison was the worst. Still, when you find what worked, you take the route best suited for you. If not, no one else would. Screw that.