1994: Throwing Out My Back

     If I was smart, I would never touch a shovel, however living a rural lifestyle has always prevented me from being smart; there are just too many jobs that I needed to do using a shovel.  Quite often when I had to do those shoveling jobs, I threw out my back, and then had to live for days, or weeks, with a very painful back.  Sometimes if I was lucky, we could make the two and a half hour drive up to Prince George so the chiropractor would “adjust” my back, and I would be miraculously cured of pain, but that didn’t always work.

    Today I will start telling you about the throwing-out-my-back episode in 1994, when I had to deal with excruciating pain during our Spring Break after we flew to Las Vegas to visit some of my family.  The cartoon shows me shoveling snow, which was often the trigger to my back pain, but in 1994, it wasn’t shoveling snow that was the cause, it was shoveling a winter’s worth of goat manure and bedding out of my barn. 

    If you remember when I blogged about our 1992 trip to Costa Rica; before we left on the trip, I also shoveled out the barn, threw out my back, then suffered back pain, during most of our exploration of Costa Rica.  In 1994, two week before we started on our trip to Vegas, I again spent a day shoveling manure out of the barn, and again, I threw threw my back out.  Five days later, as my back pain intensified, I took a day off of work, and we drove up to the chiropractor in Prince George, seeking  relief.  

    Here is the re-write account from my diary:

    I had to shovel the massive amounts of the winter’s accumulation of manure out of the barn, and as was usually the case when I did that job, I threw out my back.  The pain wasn’t too bad, so I just made myself live with it.  But then days later, when I bent down in front of the VCR to insert a movie video, my back really went out.  It was very painful, so my wife had to drive me up to Prince George to the chiropractor.  

        He restored me, and while we were up in the “Big City” we walked around and did some shopping before we headed home.  But after the long hours of driving back to McBride, all the sitting in the car and bumping around on the highway, my chiropractic “cure” was totally erased, and my back was just as bad as it was when we left McBride that morning.

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