Third in the series and Bambie attacks!

I don’t have any good drawings or photos to go with this post, so how about a true story from yesterday typed out in green italics…

Had a nice relaxing memorial weekend and hope all you did too, or at least I hope you rode bikes a bunch and it was awesome. I watched a lot of TV and drank beer. Not sure if this is an appropriate back therapy, but it was peaceful enough.

We were on the edge of the woods and Roscoe and Monty were chilling. As usual Monty was sniffing around to see what he could find…

I’ve been getting lots of letters with ideas for my back so thats been good. Tom Stober wrote me back and it sounds like he is in a similar situation to me. On going issues with his back and contemplating getting the fusion surgery. Basically they “fuse” a couple of your vertebrae together to resolve the issue of the crushed disc in between them. The disc is what flexs around and allows your back to bend. On the x-rays it looks just like the little donut part in a skateboard truck and honestly kind of works the same way. However, when you explode it they don’t really heal on their own, and put pressure on your spinal cord. Or, like in my case, allow your vertebrae to touch each other. That pressure can cause incredible pain or make a leg or part of your body not work right. In my case the pain is not super intense (though it sucks) but I loose all the strength in my lower back. Tom’s had a number of epidural shots to help ease the pain and help speed up the healing of the inflammation. This is usually done with cortizone/ corticosteriod shots. These aren’t the kind of steroids that make you big and strong (Tom just works out a lot), but they can help in healing and reducing inflammation (i’ve had it in pills a few times during my annual poison ivy allergic reaction). They always make me really grumpy and stressed. There’s some serious consideration for long term side affects as well, so you don’t want to go this route too many times. And jeeze, needles in the spine sounds gnarly!

Suddenly from the edge of the trees a tiny little baby deer sprinted out and with knobby knees and all leapt right over little Monty.

Ben Ward from Odyssey gave me a call to let me know that Rich Hirsch actually didn’t have the fusion surgery (as I reported last post) but had a different thing. Ben thought it was something where they removed a part of the disc that was pressing the spinal cord. I imagine that means they removed the little blown out part that would be creating pressure? I don’t know. Also got a number of doctor recommendations from different people for all over North America, so thanks everyone for the help!

All this happened unbeknownst to Roscoe who had his own business to attend to. The baby deer saw his opportunity and aimed his attack.

I figure when it comes to wisdom in BMX there’s few who could offer better advice then Brian Foster so I’ll include his text to me in full. He wrote: “I say all bodily pain can be cured by stretching your hamstrings. Figured the opinion of one more “specialist” couldn’t hurt. Good luck.” I agree that is good advice for all BMXers and we should all take it to heart. Because we are always pushing down with our legs our quads tend to get overly strong, but the opposing muscle doesn’t get anywhere near as developed. The result can be a tendency for your lower back to arch a little bit more than its supposed to and pelvis to tilt down. That’s true in my case and doing situps and stretching hamstrings is the best way I can come up with to relieve the stress on my spine (and relieve some of the pressure by better aligning my spine).

Blammm! The baby deer charged with all his speed and might right into the side of poor old Roscoe’s head.

I have an appointment with a back specialist/ orthopedic spinal surgeon on friday. Going to go over all my mri’s and x-rays to figure out what he thinks we can do. I hope he seems cool and can convince me he knows what’s best to do. Thanks again everyone for all the help.

Poor Roscoe was left dazed and confused (but unhurt since the deer was hardly the size of a cat). As he watched his attacker skamper off into the woods he wondered why baby deers were such little bastards.