The Best Birthday Present EVER

July 15th, 2008. Birthday #23.

I swear, all I did was bend over.

Really, that was it. I should have been fine. I should have been able to bend down (only about 20 degrees!) and screw the lightbulb in with no problem. My back should NOT have seized up so tightly that I couldn't stand up; I should not have had little white dots floating in front of my eyes or searing pain racing up my spine - but, of course, that's exactly what did happen. I fell back onto the floor as carefully as I could, seeing as how I couldn't move my neck or my back and felt like I could hardly breathe because of the shock. I sat there for a minute, hoping it would go away before everyone else got back from their lunch break. I had just confessed to my boss that my toothache of a few days had been giving me migraines and led me to spend some of my lunch break crying in the bathroom (he caught me with my eyes still red), and the last thing I wanted to do was complain that something else was wrong.

"Just breathe," I told myself. "Just breathe and your back will relax and no one will know and you can continue working." My boss walked on stage and found me on the floor, unable to hide the pain. I tried to stand up and look as normal as possible. I didn't make it 3 inches off the floor. "Tarythe..." he began, with the intention of assigning me a new project. But he instantly became serious when he saw me struggling on the ground, trying to pretend that I wasn't. "What's wrong?" he asked, reading the agony clearly written across my face. "Ummm..." I began. Then I started to cry. I gave up trying to contort my face into an expression that said, "Everything's fine, I'm just hanging out on the floor in this very awkward position for fun" and turned my efforts to explaining what had happened. He assigned a girl I work with to help me stand up and walk to the office so I could lie down on the couch for a little bit. 10 minutes later he had that same girl walk me to the on-campus nurse's office, where we met with an antagonistic and annoyed nurse who clearly did not feel like tending to me right then (after all, as she told me, it was 2:30 and she hadn't even had lunch yet). She made me cry with her "You're causing me such trouble" attitude (though, to be fair, I was already a little shaken up and sensitive right then).

All I wanted to do was go back to work, but I was sent home and given strict orders to ice and rest my back. Great. It was my birthday and I had plans for that evening, but the nurse said I could still go out as long as I rested first and took it easy that night. "I can do that," I thought. What I wasn't prepared for was the days of work I would have to take off after that, and being cooped up in the house for the rest of the week. No yardwork, no housework, nothing actually productive. Had I been in school I could have used the time to get homework done, but alas, I had none. So I played a lot of Age of Mythology instead.

I'm feeling much better, and now the only time my back really hurts is after long periods of standing or walking.