Ouch!!

I will be on my back for a while doing not very exciting things like contemplating cracks in the ceiling or that annoying cobweb that I suddenly noticed in the corner of the room.

This morning while I was bending down to pick up something, I felt a twinge in my back and I knew that I have done it again. Once you get slipped disc, it’ll never go away.

Thus it is with great pain that I am sitting here, typing this, pushing the last entry down.

It must be exactly ten years ago that I inflicted this injury. I remember the occasion very well. The then Prime Minister of Malaysia was visiting Cambridge University and we were hot on his heels, running after him, in case we missed anything. He, to tell you the truth, has more energy than all the journalists he left huffing and puffing behind him. I remember when we were in Budapest, at a press conference, he took one look at us looking like war casualties and asked: Tak penat ka ikut Prime Minister? Now how do you answer that?

Coming back to that fateful day in Cambridge, he was visiting the campus there but decided to walk and enjoy the beautiful buildings on foot instead of being chauffeured around. I took pity on my camera man and volunteered to carry the huge hefty camera which weighed a ton. Now, isn’t there a rule that you must bend your knees as you bend down? Yes, but did I heed those wise words? No. Trying to be a superwoman, I bend down from the waist, took hold of the camera and felt the first twinge of pain in the spine, already sore from an epidural injection I had some ten years back. But superwoman must soldier on, right? Anything a man can do, I must show that I can do as well.

So, I bravely carried it before Tan Sri Nordin Sopiee, my former boss at the NST, came to my rescue and gallantly carried it for me. Hah, what a relief. Assignment over but the pain persisted. And back in London, I was in the kitchen trying to reach out for something, when I had the fatal sneeze of my life. With that sneeze, I doubled up in pain and it was in that doubled up position too that I was carried screaming on the stretcher to the hospital.

There’s nothing really one can do with slipped disc, except to sleep on a wooden floor, no mattress and no pillow and not even husband's arms. One move even labour pain seems like a mild period pain . So, there I was for five days, flat on my back, contemplating the ceiling.

Suddenly, the picture frame on the wall needed straightening up, the books on the racks are not properly arranged, the hems on the curtains have come undone, and I couldn’t move!!! How irritating can that be!!! I could have read War and Peace twice. I could memorise names of characters in every soap on telly and did crossword puzzles even the difficult ones in The Guardian! How I wish I could get up and strip the wall paper and tile the bathroom.

It is strange that when you are in that position and not allowed or not able to move, you think of the most unimaginable things that you want to do. I thought of getting up to do the break-dance, and vowed that once I am back on my feet, I’d take up badminton again and perhaps enrol in one of those belly dancing classes. In fact, exactly five days after that I was on my way to Birmingham, again with my crew to cover another story. You can’t keep me down for ever. And a few weeks after that joined my children ice skating.

Anyway, while in pain, just how do you get to the toilet to do number one and two? With great difficulty and excruciating pain, of course. The preparation to get up alone would take up to ten to fifteen minutes. We tried different positions, my husband and I (and don’t let your mind roam any further!) Under any other circumstances, I would certainly have enjoyed it. He’d either pull me straight up and carry me piggy back to the bathroom, or scoop me up like a baby. Either way, it is a torture and always ended up in tears. My pain threshhold is very very low.

This time is not that bad ‘cos I can sit down and pray while sitting down. But I do miss the piggy back!