Gosh, so much has happened since my last post! If you remember, last Saturday I threw my back out. Well, since then I have laid on my back, wincing with pain every time I moved. END OF UPDATE.

Yeah, this particular back injury is one tenacious motherfucker. When this has happened before, it has usually started to ease up after about four days. This one has no intention of leaving. I missed an entire week of work; I had a couple of physical therapy appointments and then an MRI on Thursday, which revealed a “prominent disc bulge.” Funny how “prominent” and “bulge” are usually so alluring together, and yet you toss “disc” in the middle and it loses all of its sexiness. It’s like putting the word “training” between “hot” and “pants.”

I’m seeing an orthopedist on Monday. My back has been feeling a little. better, by which I mean it’s now only a five-point procedure in hauling myself out of bed, rather than the old 12-point plan. But perhaps that’s the Percocet (which I just got two days ago) talking. Look at me, I’m Paula Abdul! I’ve had vicodin occasionally, and I never saw what the fuss was about. And I tried one Percocet and again, found it underwhelming. But then I tried TWO Percocet. Hello, best friend!

Anyway, hopefully after some more physical therapy and time, this will go away. I swear daily that when this is all healed, I am finally going to either do yoga or at least regularly do back exercises to make sure this never happens again. This of course is the same oath I make every time I throw my back out. And then it heals, and I promptly forget said oath. It’s much like a teenager praying for a negative on a pregnancy test. But this time I mean it, dammit. Who knows, maybe this will all lead to a program of stretching that will, for the first time in my life, allow me to touch my toes. I am the least flexible person in the world. Even as a kid, I dreaded story time on the mat, because it would mean me struggling for a half hour to maintain the cross-legged sit. (Or, as we so insensitively called it in those days, “Indian style.” Or was it the “Mexican squat”? I always get the un-PC comments of the days of yore mixed up.) I would usually last about ten minutes before my limbs would snap back to their usual straight position and I would topple back to the mat, arms akimbo. And that’s why the ladies loved me.

I’ve also learned the dangers of flailing around the web for suggestions for a cure for back pain. If you tally up all the random posts on the Internet answering the question, “What do you do for back pain?”, it would be a perfect four way tie between “heat on the first day, then ice,” “only ice,” “only wet heat” and “alternate heat and cold.” And as positive a person is that theirs is the only way to go, the next person is just as positive that the previous poster is a fucking idiot who is a danger to himself and others. Can I get a goddamn consensus here? It makes me long for the pre-Internet days, when everyone had to keep their utter surety to themselves. One doctor, one directive.

So how did I keep myself busy during my prone days? Watching I’m a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here! I can’t resist this awful show. The cast is not only unapologetically D-list, but they’ve also all let themselves go. One doughy ex-NBA star, two doughy Baldwins, and Lou Diamond Phillips, who looks like he’s constantly sucking in his gut. And when he lets that thing go, it will knock everyone down in his path. I feel like the stringent game-show laws about truthfulness that came about after the Twenty-One scandal in the 50s should be applied here: legally, when the hosts refer to the players as celebrities, they should be forced to use air quotes. Otherwise, it’s just a bald-faced lie. Seriously, Frangela? What the fuck is a Frangela?

And Patti Blogojevich! There was a ridiculous moment in which she told a bunch of castmates how the evil forces that were railroading her husband, Rod (the same husband—and same wife, come to think of it—who was caught on tape licking their lips over the bribes they were demanding). And all the other “celebrities” began tut-tutting about how unfair it all was, and boy, was he a good man who would ultimately triumph. How reassuring it must be to be surrounded by people who have never read a newspaper in their lives. They say that many celebrities are unfairly let out of jury duty: after watching this scene, I am all for it.

So that’s the exciting part of my days: Waiting for this show to come on. Well, that and trying to time all trips to the bathroom to the crest of the Percocet wave. Oh, and staring at a heating blanket and an ice pack, trying desperately not to make the wrong decision. (Incidentally, my physical therapist votes for ice, and I’m sticking with that, thank you very much.)