<\/p>\n
I had <\/strong><\/span>a part-time job dealing with my back pain. I enrolled in a three-month Cleveland Clinic program for back-pain sufferers. It was a group class. Rule #1 of the class: Nobody wants to hear about your back pain. #2: Never say \u201cpain,” it’s \u201cdiscomfort.\u201d<\/p>\n To get rid of\u00a0back pain, I would have paid 400K.\u00a0 I would have walked down Euclid Avenue naked. I would have . . . [fill in the blank]. Philosopher Viktor Frankl said how you deal with your suffering is one way to define your life. I would have bribed and cheated — for starters.<\/p>\n My back-class classmates were mostly whiners (like me). One woman said she lay in bed all day, using ice packs. Another used a heating pad and lay in bed all day. The group psychologist said, \u201cWhat do you do to get out of your stupor?\u201d Classmates said they lie in bed.<\/p>\n After class, I met a friend for lunch and said, \u201cWhat a great day. It\u2019s sunny out.\u201d I was just doing my cognitive behavioral therapy (CBT), circumventing my usual glass-half-empty M.O.<\/p>\n My back<\/strong> <\/span>doctor said, \u201cBack pain is truly one of the medical conditions that can rate a 10 on a pain level.\u201d I told him I was at 8. He said back pain typically went away within a year, often less. I said my pain was like a hundred cell phones vibrating in my thigh all at once. (My back pain was\u00a0in my thigh. Uh.) Or a thousand red ants scurrying. I had a couple CAT scans.<\/p>\n A woman in my class said her mantra was \u201cI\u2019ve got this!\u201d Nice mantra. When she moved out of town, I took her mantra. I meditated and tried new exercises, developing new neural pathways!<\/p>\n \u201cMotion is the lotion\u201d was a sign in the physical therapy department. A couple verbal catch phrases were \u201cExercise to the pain but not through the pain” and \u201cSore but safe.\u201d I saw a lot of PTs.<\/p>\n The pain<\/strong><\/span> ended in 10 months. Two shots in the back helped. I think about back pain a lot. Even when I don’t have it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" I had a part-time job dealing with my back pain. I enrolled in a three-month Cleveland Clinic program for back-pain sufferers. It was a group class. Rule #1 of the class: Nobody wants to hear about your back pain. #2: Never say \u201cpain,” it’s \u201cdiscomfort.\u201d To get rid of\u00a0back pain, I would have paid 400K.\u00a0 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-28651","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28651","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28651"}],"version-history":[{"count":10,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28651\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":28791,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28651\/revisions\/28791"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28651"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28651"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.yiddishecup.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28651"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}