More Coffee Please

Last week I did something to my back.

For the first couple of days, I could barely move without insanely excruciating pain shooting up my spine, stopping my breath and making me gasp. It reminded me of back labour, except it was even more painful. I was creeping around very gingerly, holding my lower back and making grumbly-gaspy old-lady noises whenever I had to stand up or sit down.

What did I do to myself? Well, the last time I did something similar (although much less severe) to my back, it was right before I went to Bermuda. The only possible similarity in the circumstances between then and last weekend: shaving my legs for the first time in months. I did nothing unusual other than that in either circumstance. So I am forced to conclude that I’ve been totally disabled by a shaving injury, and not even the exciting dramatic kind with spurts of blood and bandages and things. I don’t even get a good story out of it.

Pathetic.

I have, in the past week, had a chance to experiment with and review pretty much all legal methods of pain relief, and so for public benefit and scientific interest here are my experiences with the many forms of back-pain analgesia. I measure pain terms of a typical pain scale from 0 (no pain) to 10 (excruciating, can’t think of anything else).

Aspirin: 1 point of pain reduction
Tylenol: 1 point of pain reduction
Ibuprofen (Advil): Zero. No pain reduction at all. Very disappointing and a bit surprising.
Naproxen (prescription): Zero. This really surprised me, since naproxen is usually good for physical/anti-inflammatory/muscle-y stuff — it’s great for arthritis.
AC&C (aspirin, caffeine, codeine): 2 points of pain reduction. My usual over-the-counter treatment for migraines wasn’t as useful here as I had expected.
Robacexet (Tylenol + methocarbamol): 3 points of pain reduction. Be sure to buy the coated version of any methocarbamol-containing product, because it is as bitter as quinine. Blech.
Robacexet (Aspirin + codeine + methocarbamol): 4 points of pain reduction. You have to ask the pharmacist for this stuff; it’s hidden behind the counter. Millions of thanks to Twitterer height8 for this tip.
A535 Dual-Action patches: 2 points of pain reduction. The patches really do last for four hours, and are less awkward than a hot water bottle stuffed down your pants if you need to be out and about. Plus you end up smelling kinda minty, which I’ll consider as a plus. And you can use this in combination with some sort of drug, so its 2 points of pain reduction are more useful than it initially appears.
A535 lotion: 1 point of pain reduction, and it doesn’t last long — maybe half an hour? Side note: it’s always bothered my scientific self that rubbing something on skin can do something useful for bone stuff like arthritis, but damn, the stuff does work for the arthritis in my hands for whatever reason (I’m sure it messes with how nerve endings interpret information or something), so I thought I’d give it a try for this too. Not really worth the bother in this case.
Hot water bottle: 3 points of pain reduction. How I love my hot water bottle, despite its annual dramatic structural failure and need to be replaced. However, there is only so much you can do that is productive while lying face-down with a hot-water bottle on your lower back.
2 glasses of red wine (an accidental discovery): 5 points of pain reduction.

Why? Why does red wine work well when normal drugs don’t, and when it doesn’t work at all for any other kind of pain? It is a mystery. Also, it’s deeply impractical — while two glasses of wine aren’t enough to be seriously impairing, they are enough to fog one’s brain a bit and they certainly aren’t the sort of pain solution you can deploy repeatedly throughout, say, one’s work day. At least not in my line of work (and I have lovely colleagues who, when they discover me lying flat on my back on a boardroom table to rest my back, skip the WTF? reactions and launch more-or-less directly into work-related conversations).

Anyway, one week later my back is feeling significantly better. Still, I’ve had a reminder about the immense respect I have for people who live with chronic pain — pain is one thing when you know or think it will be temporary, but quite another when it is likely to be long-term or permanent. It takes immense guts and determination to live a semi-normal life, to think through the fog that pain puts in your head, and to not be intensely crabby all the time. I bow to you all.