Back in ’90, when I was the cocksure age of 18, I made a daredevil jump down a 10-foot ledge onto concrete. Lacking the experience with jumps, the kind that teaches you how to “tuck and roll”, I slid off the edge and stuck the landing straight-legged and flat-footed. The sting of my feet overshadowed the shock of impact that traveled up my body. After a few weeks, the back pain began, and would manifest when I laid down for bed, requiring me to scrunch up as I laid down and slowly release to decompress my spine. After a few years, that too faded and I was normal again.

My health turned for the worse when I took my current job. Having a sedentary work environment, plus the means and social motivation to eat out every day at lunch, are a bad combination; my previous job, at the printshop, paid me just enough to make sandwiches to eat when I took a break from the physical labor. The extra weight gain with the lack of exercise set the stage for my core muscles to lose strength and go slack, which is exactly what they did in March ’09. One slack moment was all it took to tweak my discs while I was seated. I’ve been riding on this rollercoaster ever since.

Essentially, a disc herniation is where the disc, made of a mass of squishy gel surrounded by concentric fibrous rings to hold everything in, gets ripped open and blown out sideways due to physical shock. It’s like popping a stress ball. The gel insides begin to squish out over time and can press against the nerve bundles that run out of the spine. Eventually, with the right treatment, the section of the rings sticking out of the vertebrae dissolve and rebuild. There are several treatments for this, but the most obvious is to change my lifestyle and get more exercise. Walking is the most appropriate form, the more aerobic the better; the bouncing of a normal gait aids in increasing bloodflow which allows it to heal. The exercise also helps strengthen the core muscles allowing me to move without reinjury.

My initial session of physical therapy was two days ago, and the first of four training sessions is Monday. I hope I can turn my life around and put myself back on the mend. I healed after the ’90 incident because I was young and physically active through walking all over the college campus. But not so much exercise now, so healing after this incident will require all the help and lifestyle change I can muster.

Today, I got a bomb dropped on me in the form of two envelopes from my health insurance carrier. Inside is a pair of Explanation of Benefits (EOB). Remember back in March and April when I saw the chiropractor because my back was messed up and I needed help in a bad way? Well, I finally got the insurance statements from all those visits. The end result is that my insurance carrier won’t pay for a single thing; their rejection reason is that the chiropractor isn’t in network. That’s Bullshit with a capital B.

When I was looking for help, I called the clinic; I’ve been to this clinic for 7 years…my general practitioner is there. And, for a while, so was the chiropractor. So I called the office to check, to see if I would be covered if I saw her for my back. The operator said she’d have to pass on the question to the billing department. They called me back and confirmed to the positive that I would have coverage, so I made the first of a series of appointments.

The first visit was nothing but a consultation on Monday. She then sent me for X-rays which I took that day. Then, since she didn’t show up to the office for my appointment on Wednesday, I had to come in Thursday to look over the X-rays and come up with a treatment plan. THEN, finally, had a visit Friday to pop my back into shape…two weeks after injury. She wanted me to visit three times the next week (office visits are $30 copay each time), but I whittled it down to two visits. By the end of that week, it was revealed that she was no longer a member of the clinic and that she would start her own practice elsewhere. So, I didn’t visit her again.

I had been waiting on the EOBs from the visit, but suspected something was dreadfully wrong. All my other EOBs from all the other visits to the various doctors I see produce an EOB from my insurer in short time. Something had to be wrong, and fucking hell, it was very wrong. I tallied up the charges from those five visits and the X-rays: $1270. You read that correctly.

My blood is boiling; I haven’t felt this level of rage in years. It’s an impotent rage because in the wash of corporate displacement and beaurocratic process, I have no target. No one is to blame. Nobody is at fault, and my only recourse is to play the game. I was provided an address to submit a written appeal; you can damn-well believe I’ll appeal. This is Bullshit. If I had known that the chiropractor was out of network, I would not have fucking gone for the first visit, let alone all five. I was lied to. I believed the lie. The one who lied to me didn’t know they were lying. Misinformation happened.

My teeth are grinding. Whatever it was I was doing in my life, whatever I had planned for the weekend, it’s fucked. My teeth are grinding. I’m in a corner, and I am ready to bite.

Nice and warm today, and I’m out and about on foot. Should’ve worn a hat. Springtime here in Austin is a beautiful, beautiful time. The birds come out and show their colours. And boy, how they shine. It was cold and wretched yesterday, and the lack of a crowd at Pease park was incredible. I was able to walk around without dodging unleashed dogs or ducking for cover from errant frisbee golf discs.

Got a call from my chiropractor yesterday (unorthodox, given it was Saturday). She left a message announcing that my doctor’s clinic has decided to kick her out and replace her with a physical therapist. That’s a condemnation on her, to be sure, but I wonder what the true reason is.

Maybe she’s not performing to the business metrics required by the clinic, like keeping up rental contributions on the exam room, keeping a certain quantity of clientelle, making sure the number of reschedules and days out are below a limit. Maybe the clinic, in hiring her and the acupuncturist, made a grab at “embracing the eastern medicines” for holistic therapy, but now in this current market all the white people are shedding their need to spend money on the frou-frou stuff. I dunno.

What I do know is that she fixed my back and gave me a few methods to strengthen myself against further problems. I do feel some allegiance to go back to her at her new solo practice, but given the uneven ride thus far, I’m not sure if I should cut and run, passing the buck onto my insurance company’s support of her services, or just keep going.

I’ll return her call Monday and talk to my insurance carrier to see if my visits will still be covered. But even then, at $30 copay per office visit, it’d be a tall order to actually visit her as often as she’d like. I’m not made of money.

Speaking of money, the paycut I got a few months ago is starting to affect me. I’ve gotten some money on the side here and there (like the check from when the kid backed into my car), and soon I’ll be getting my tax return, but no matter where I cut corners, I’m just above breaking even, and that’s scary. May 27 is my 24-month anniversary at my job, and nobody but Volt and my client’s HR department know if they will honor my latest extension to August or if they’ll walk me out the door next month. Looking at my bank balance, I seriously hope they let me stay around.

I picked up the new U2 album “No Line on the Horizon”, and I’m giving it a spin right now. I like it so far. I may make a review later.

Worst birthday ever.

“Sure.”

It is a sunday. The UT students are back. It is raining; not the heavy rain that breeds excitement, but the light “well, I think I’ll rain…nah, hold on…would you settle for some drizzles on your glasses?” kind of rain. The kind of rain that clings to your side windows and obscures your vision when you’re trying to pull out into traffic. The kind of rain that falls from clouds that just stay all day, obscuring the sun and chilling the ground. The kind of rain that breeds mold.

It is a sunday.

I slept for something resembling 10 hours. It wasn’t a spectacular kind of sleep. It just hung there and lingered. The dreams and fantasies dragged on while my twisted backbone generated enough pain to make the dreams not worth the alpha waves. As I sit here 5 hours after waking up and after a hot shower, some stretching, and a warm meal, my back is still hurting. It’s times like this that I wish I had a drug habit.

There is this guy here at this coffee house who I don’t think I like. I’ve never met the guy. Don’t even know his name. But I don’t like him. Two months ago I was sitting at Spiderhouse, another coffeeshop, with an old friend of mine; she was giving me the lowdown on one of her ex-boyfriends who disappeared from her life and then reappeared at Spiderhouse that night to do the “I don’t see you, you don’t exist” thing at her. She pointed him out to show me who he was as he was about to walk by. He saw me looking at him and nailed his eyes back at me as he kept walking by, like he was saying, “You got a problem, fuckhead?” But I didn’t look away. For once, I didn’t look away. And now that guy is here, at Flightpath.

I shouldn’t feel anything about the whole thing. I shouldn’t. But I do. It was a glare, a daring glare. The kind of glare that communicates with the Animal Urge underneath. He’s nothing to me. I’m nothing to him. And I have this fear/anger motivation. My friends that night, when I mentioned the exchange, said, “Dude, it’s nothing. Just let it go. Don’t let it get to you.” This is the kind of thing that happens on 6th street downtown. A stare is an offense punishable by an asskicking. But nothing happened. Nothing has happened. And I’m a fool for holding onto it.

Fuck.

It is a sunday. Hello.

The past two or so weeks have driven me kinda nuts. Three weeks ago I started coming down with a cold; the whole ears/sinus/throat thing. Well, it went away after an evening, and a few days later I went out to eat; had a meal with some chips and salsa. The salsa irritated my throat which started swelling up. This, of course, broke down the defenses enough to let whatever was waiting in the wings to come in and give me a full-on infection. I had a cold. Lacking the desire to go anywhere or do anything, and wracked with morals that prevented me from spreading my cold to others, I stayed at home for a week at a half. I went to work like normal, but I had to take a day off after the doctor visit because I was too ill to work. And now I’m finally getting well enough to go out; I’m still sniffling, and my chest tightens up every now and then. I’m at 80%, but that’s it.

I hate the cold, damp weather of mid-winter in central Texas.

My time spent on IRC these days is less than stellar. Each day that passes shows me that I’m not cut from the same cloth as most of the people in the one IRC channel I frequent. There are a few people I revere; the rest can rot away, I don’t mind. It is in IRC that I keep getting proven, day after day, that it’s just not worth speaking up or having discussion because someone, thanks to remoteness and anonymity, will fire off an insult or two and make my attempt at carrying a point across worth nothing. It seems the laws of the street apply online as well.

So should I give up on IRC as well, as I’ve given up on other things in the past year, or should I hold on or join other channels? This sounds so stupid. But this is the level my life is at these days. Debating my presence on IRC. Screwit. When the balance between the benefits of chatting with other people and having a good laugh is outweighed by swagger, bravado, attitudes, and insults, it is time to move on.

The balance is tipping.