There was Heidi, standing over me, saying, “Breathe… Breathe… Breathe…”

I had blacked out in the hallway. I have no idea how long I was gone. Earlier, I had thrown my back out doing something spectacularly unimpressive: I was picking up a CD off the couch. I had thrown my back out before, so at first I wasn’t especially worried. I took some pain pills, laid down on the couch, and waited for it to settle down. Instead it got worse and worse until I finally decided I should try to make it to the bedroom. I stood up, started walking, and the next thing I remember is Heidi above me telling me to breathe. After that, mostly I remember pain. There wasn’t much room for anything else. I stayed down while Heidi called an emergency nurse line to figure out what we were supposed to do, and somewhere around all of this were four little kids who were worried about their dad, including Finn, who was only a few months old. We also had a brand-new puppy named Agnes who was only a few months old herself. It was quite the scene.

I was sort of able to walk after that, but “walk” is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I had an old cane that had belonged to my grandpa and I used that to get around. The exact order of the next few days is fuzzy now. I saw a doctor at the UW clinic in Shoreline, there were phone calls, I got sent to a neurosurgeon, and somewhere in the middle of all of that there was an MRI. What I remember clearly is sitting with the neurosurgeon, Dr. Daniel Lazar, while he showed me the scan and explained what had happened in a way that apparently lodged itself permanently in my brain. He told me to imagine the discs in my spine like jelly donuts. Sometimes, when one gets squished, the jelly comes out to the left. Sometimes it comes out to the right. Mine had managed the much less common trick of squishing right down the middle and pinching my spinal cord. The solution, as he explained it to me, was basically to go in and shave off the jelly that had squished out. I also remember Lazar’s name because it sounded like “LASERS!” which felt like a very appropriate name for a surgeon even though, as far as I know, no lasers were involved.

This was at L4/L5. Seven years earlier I had already herniated the disc one house down, at L5/S1, so apparently this was a neighborhood problem. I don’t remember exactly how the decision for surgery came together in 2012, but I remember insurance being part of it. There was a chance to get the procedure approved and done almost immediately, otherwise I was looking at waiting a month or two while still living in that kind of pain. Insurance approved it quickly, so we moved quickly. On December 20 I was telling people I had just found out I was having surgery the next morning. I was supposed to check in at Northwest Hospital at 5:30 a.m., go under around 7:30, and the surgery itself was expected to take only about 45 minutes with an overnight stay. Heidi drove me there. I don’t remember being especially nervous. By that point I was mostly excited by the possibility that someone could make the pain stop.

I remember almost nothing after that. I was really drugged up.

I know the surgery happened, I know Heidi was there, I know Finn was in the room with us afterward because there is a photo of Heidi feeding him in my hospital room, and I know I made it home, but the hospital itself is mostly a pharmaceutical blur. The recovery is where the memories start to come back. I spent a lot of the next few weeks on the couch in our house in Lynnwood. Agnes loved this arrangement. She would climb onto my legs while I was stretched out under a blanket, roll over, and fall asleep there like my immobility was simply a new piece of furniture purchased for her convenience.

We built Lego as a family. One of the sets was a medieval jousting scene, and there is a very bad photo of it that I took while on pain medication, which is probably all the explanation the photo needs. Christmas was happening around us, the kids were still kids, the puppy was still a puppy, and ordinary family life just sort of rearranged itself around the fact that I was horizontal most of the time.

I did start walking again pretty quickly, at least in little bursts. By December 30 I was out on a small nature walk with the family, moving slowly through wet Northwest woods while my back was still very much informing me that it had opinions about all of this.

The surgery fixed the immediate problem, but it didn’t magically make me pain-free. I was still in a lot of pain. For a while I couldn’t sit for more than a few minutes at a time, so I converted my desk into a standing desk and worked that way. That arrangement lasted quite a while. Recovery wasn’t really a clean line from broken to fixed. It was more like gradually negotiating with my body over what I was allowed to do that day.

And this wasn’t the first time my back had negotiated my life for me. Exactly one week after I turned 25, in November 2005, I was doing a side project for a guy I worked with at SME named Donal. My job was to bury a grounding wire. It wasn’t even a serious excavation project, just a shallow trench, maybe six or twelve inches deep, dug with a hand shovel. I don’t remember the electrical code from twenty years ago, so don’t use this as installation guidance. I was covering the cable back up when I felt a pop in my lower back and suddenly I couldn’t move. An MRI showed a herniation at L5/S1. I eventually got a steroid injection that took away most of the worst pain, but even after the pain improved I was too weak to return to electrical work. My doctor told me that a career involving heavy lifting and constant bending was no longer a good idea and that I needed to find a desk job. So I went on long-term disability, started taking classes at community college, and by the spring of 2006 I had somehow wandered into Mars Hill and started fixing laptops. I stuck around for a while.

That first back injury changed the direction of my life far more than I understood at the time. I had been an electrician. Then my back decided it did not want to be an electrician, so I had to become something else. Computers led to Mars Hill, Mars Hill led to The City, and from there my life wandered through technology, video production, startups, live broadcasts, all kinds of things I probably would not have predicted while standing there with a shovel in 2005. Then in 2012 the disc one level up decided it also wanted a vote. Bodies are silly that way. Sometimes they do ridiculous things. Sometimes they squish their internal jelly donuts in exactly the wrong direction.

I never fully healed from it. I’m sitting here writing this fourteen years later and I can still feel that spot in my back. It is a little tender even now. The scar is still there. I know I can’t push my back too hard, and I’ve known some version of that about myself since I was 25. I don’t know that there is a moral to any of this. It’s just part of life. Bodies break, heal badly, heal partly, adapt, complain, and occasionally redirect the entire course of your existence because you picked up a CD or covered six inches of dirt over a wire. My back has always dictated my life in one way or another. Maybe that’s the spine of the story.