That's A Wrap
For the past few months, I have been dealing with a rather serious back injury. It's called a wedge deformity, and it takes place when some sort of a stressor is placed upon your spine and causes the normally roughly cube-shaped vertebrae to deform into a vaguely wedge-shaped piece of bone and nerves. It's quite painful, and over the course of last season, finally got me off skates for the last two games of the season plus our big year-end two-day tournament.
It also knocked me out of the driving business for a while, because when you're eating anywhere from two to five Vicodin a day, you cannot legally drive. Therefore I have been on office desk duty since the beginning of September, and while I don't miss the awfulness of my bus passengers, I do miss the 11:30 - 7:30 PM daily schedule, rather than being under a fluorescent sky at 8:00 AM sharp.
In the last month, I've experienced real progress on rehabbing from the injury, to the point where I might be able to resume my driving duties in a few weeks. This would also coincide with the resumption of my refereeing duties, and considering that our club is now a nationally ranked power, the opportunities are beginning to line up.
However, the last two and a half months or so have been pretty dark. Having near-constant pain every day that you have to take powerful pain medication for on a regular basis really wears you down. I've never been placed on injured reserve for the remainder of a sports season for something I was involved with, and I didn't deal with it very well. I felt horrible for my wife having to watch her husband be sucked down into a black hole. And of course, there was the looming specter of the failure of Gilded Dragonfly Books to follow through on their request for the manuscript of Salvation with an offer for publication. Having all those things pressed together in such a short period of time really cast me down, folks.
But I think things are turning around. I don't have to take pain medication while at the office any more, as opposed to when I first started the assignment and was either in pain or a half-stoned zombie all the time. I'm cleared to skate again. I have a much better attitude and am now much closer to being the man my wife fell in love with. And I've reached out to another publisher and submitted Salvation, putting Gilded Dragonfly Books in the rear-view mirror permanently... unless I get to be a big success, in which case I will slam them in interviews every chance I get.
Oh, and I'll be 40 on December 30th.
2014 will be a good year. After all, the bar has been set pretty low. :)