no crazy walks until the fall, I guess

Since Sunday, I've been suffering from some major, nearly debilitating back pain. I don't know where this came from; I certainly haven't been doing any heavy lifting... unless we count heaving my blubberous body weight around as heavy lifting. All I can think is that I might have slept the wrong way, and this somehow did my lumbar vertebrae a bad turn. As long as I keep my spine more or less vertical, I'm fine, and as long as I'm actually walking, I'm also fine. Same for when I'm truly seated in my office chair. But the process of sitting down, standing up, and bending over (as when I'm washing dishes in my office building's dwarf-height utility sink)—these are all painfully achy experiences. I'm taking aspirin and doing that knees-to-chest stretching exercise for one's back, but so far, neither measure is helping very much. I remember my father having to deal with back pain, to the point where, sometime in his sixties, he began visiting the hospital to get periodic shots that numbed the pain and allowed him to function. His condition didn't involve anything so extreme as bulging or ruptured discs, as far as I know, but somewhere along his spinal column, pressure was being applied and nerves were getting squeezed, if not outright pinched. Like father, like son? I hope not.

Many of the bike paths I walk are dotted with exercise stations. Most of the equipment is the sort of useless range-of-motion crap that's meant for old people trying to retain basic flexibility, but there are occasionally some useful devices there, such as the "gravity boot" board into which you hook your feet, then rotate the board so that your head is near the ground, and your feet point at the sky. This allows gravity to stretch your spine, although it also encourages all your blood to rush into your head, which may not be too salutary an experience after a few minutes. I might try that tonight. I've never done it before.

My right foot continues to ache. I may have to buy some athletic bandages with which to wrap my foot and provide some orthotic-style support. Since childhood, I've known I have high arches, and given all the walking I do (my feet seem to have gone from a size 10.5 to a size 12 since 2013), there's a chance that the strain is finally catching up. So while my back is fine when I walk, my right foot isn't fine at all. This feels a bit like checkmate to me: I can't do one of my favorite activities—not for long distances, anyway. I also can't rest without discomfort, so it sucks no matter what I do. Maybe this is the Good Lord's way of saying that the only escape from all these problems is simply to lose all the damn weight.

Upshot: I'm in no shape to do a crazy walk this coming weekend, and given how the weather is warming up, it may be too late to do such a walk, anyway: I'd start at night, when it's relatively cool, but I'd still end up spending hours and hours under the punishing glare of the sun, which doesn't look kindly upon this tiny peninsula this time of year.


ADDENDUM: along with my other problems, my contact lenses have gotten scratchy over the past couple of weeks. Since I'd bought them in April of 2018, that would make sense: they're year-long lenses, so they need to be tossed, and I have to buy a new pair. I expect I'll pay the usual W70,000 for them—a price that hasn't changed since 2005. I don't know how contact lenses have managed to defy the ever-rising tide of inflation, but they have. Spooky.