Posture Pals

I don't have a history of back trouble. Let's get that out of the way at the outset. I pull the occasional muscle and subject myself to occasional overwork like anyone, but for the most part my back has been as uncomplaining a mass of bone, muscle and gristle as one could want.

Which made my sudden descent into back pain about two weeks ago seem really strange and alarming. It was concentrated in my lower back and it was awful, so bad that I was starting to think that there was something seriously wrong with me (and there still might be). By Tuesday of this week I wanted to scream it was so awful. Or was it? "Awful" is a tricky thing - one person's awful is another person's minor annoyance, and in any event awful in my book is reserved for heart attack pain. That shit's awful. The back pain was just kind of annoying, so that I'd get home after 12 hours at work and I really wouldn't want to do anything but take four Tylenol, take a shower, go to bed, and try not to imagine all the horrible things that might be wrong with my back.

So Wednesday I was sitting at work being morose - my back hurt and my iPod battery had given out - when I became dimly aware of the coincidence that my back pain really started at about the same time I started using a new chair in the environmental lab at work. The environmental lab is pretty much a bummer in and of itself - it varies between very hot and very cold, depending on which of the environmental chambers are leaking, and the ceaseless racket of the air hammers in the vibration tables sounds for all the world like a parking lot full of idling big rigs.

The environmental lab is also where chairs go to die. Nobody goes back there unless they have to, so if anyone has a broken or deformed chair they want to get rid of, they wheel it back into the environmental lab and ditch it. There's a chair that pitches violently forward. There's a chair whose wheels fall off when you try to roll. There's a chair whose height adjustment cylinder leaks and subjects you to heart-stoppingly sudden jerks as it drops about an inch at a time. Then there's my chair, which I didn't realize at the time was channelling the spirit of Doan, of Doan's Pills fame.

I switched chairs and within a half an hour the steady, relentless pain in my back started to fade. On the way home I leaned my car seat back farther than normal, far enough that the upper left part of my forehead no longer hit the raised trim piece on the ceiling of the car. By the time I got home I felt wonderful, and I didn't even have that sore spot on the upper left side of my forehead either.

I note that since Wednesday, my back pain isn't quite gone. Apparently it isn't enough to just sit in a different chair; I also have to perform some sort of exorcism on the Satan Chair that half-wrecked me in the first place. I have it hidden behind a chamber, next to the yellow cabinet that bears the vivid (and amusing) sign "Danger: Alcahal!" When I figure out what the proper rites are, I'll go ahead with the exorcism, and then I imagine the last twinges of back pain will go away for good. The power of good posture compells you!


There is a link between drugs used in heart surgery and kidney tumors, and I really need to get myself to the doctor even though it doesn't hurt any more. Better safe than sorry.