It’s a real struggle living with Scheuermanns disease. About 7 years ago I was drinking about a liter of vodka a day. I often sat in my living room Sunday afternoon wondering why CNBC would be running live quotes and have tomorrows date on the screen. This went on for several years because of the back pain and I wouldn't know what day it was.
Being 30 years old my spine felt like that of an old man. When I was working which mostly comprised of sitting in a cubicle doing financial stuff 8 hours a day. My muscle spasms in my upper-mid back would be so irritating that all I could think about was getting home to my beloved Karkov vodka. This self medicating had worked for years. Or should I say ‘got me by’ for years. Then I ran into a tipping point in which the negative effects of drinking far outweighed the positives. Actually, it’s this ‘seeing’ the tipping point for oneself that is the actual tipping point. People who know you may have suggested that the tipping point had happened years before.
It’s weird how what you think about expands. Thoughts of pain lead to experiencing more pain and that leads to thinking about how much pain you’re in. It took me several of those 4 week alcohol rehabilitation programs to break my drinking habit. I haven’t consumed any alcohol in almost 7 years now. Alcoholics Anonymous is a very interesting experience. It is written in the AA Big Book, “Alcohol is but a symptom.” This is meant for drug addiction to, in that your drug of choice is an effect of a larger underlying problem. I believed my alcoholism was due to Scheuermanns Disease. That excuse only works for a short time though. After an addiction sets in, it takes’ on a life of its own and becomes a new problem. What had caused an addiction is no longer important, but rather why an addiction continues is the real issue. Basically, what keeps an addiction going is the fact that it’s an addiction. It’s even called ‘addiction’ to point out the fact that addiction is what we’re talking about.
The other day I read an article that said, “Legal drugs are killing far more people than illegal drugs.” An analysis of 168,900 autopsies in Dade County Florida found that the rate of death was THREE times more in prescription drugs than in the rate of illicit drugs COMBINED. This includes cocaine, heroin, and crystal meth which caused 989 deaths compared to 2328 deaths from strong painkillers such as Oxycontin and Vicodin. Depressents like Valium and Xanax led to 743 deaths.
Now that we know how severe prescription drug abuse is, let’s look at one of the causes of addiction, that being pain. You might find this explanation of scheuemanns disease informative.
Scheuermanns is a disease in which several vertebra bodies and discs, usually in the mid upper Thoracic spine, grow wrong during adolescence. The vertebra bodies grow faster on the outside (exterior) then they do on the inside (anterior) causing the vertebras to become wedged shaped. This gives off a hunchback appearance. This physical disorder can morph into psychological disorders like that of a Body Dysmorphic Disorder. This is basically an unhealthy mental preoccupation of the spinal defect. It can exaggerate the disability into a full blown mental impairment, which can be just as debilitating as the actual physical spinal impairment. Scheuermanns can cause a severe negative self-image because of the hunchback (kyphosis) of the upper spine. In the movie ‘The Hunchback of Notre Dame,’ Quasimodo the bell-ringer was awarded the dubious distinction “Pope of Fools” for being the ugliest person in Paris. It sure looked like he had Scheuermanns disease.
Scheuermanns disease is like wearing an “S” curved spine. A man 6 feet tall who weighs only 160 pounds can look down and see a big fat belly. This is the lower half of the spine swayed inward which is called lardosis. Behind the protruding belly may be a real or imagined bubble butt, again the result of the S curved spine. What my Scheuermanns feels like is that “I’m a white man with a black butt.” Not to offend, just describing myself.
What is going on in between the wedged shaped vertebra bodies is usually Disc Degeneration Disease. DDD is disc desiccation (disc dehydration) is where the disc will appear black in an X-ray because of the lack of water. What is happening is that the End-Plates of your vertebra bodies (the top and bottom of vertebra bodies) take a beating because they are not being cushioned by healthy water filled discs. Vertebra End-Plates will chip and micro-fracture causing schmorls’ nodes in your vertebra bodies. I would like you to Google ‘schmorls’ nodes’ so you can see a picture of these things.
To describe schmorls’ nodes to others, I would say “picture a pancake with strawberries on top and lets’ also put a bunch of strawberries underneath. The vertebra bodies are not sitting perfectly stable on top of a pancake shaped disc like that in a healthy spine. Rather they are balancing on top of schmorls’ nodes (strawberries) which are wobbly. Because my spine is not self-stabilizing like in a normal spine, my muscles, tendons and ligaments are overworked in the effective area (T5 – T11) in their attempt to create good posture. My back muscles can be very fatigued only an hour into my workday, because it’s my muscles keeping my spine from wobbling. It’s as if people with scheuermanns disease are giving a piggyback ride to a 40 lb. toddler. It’s my muscles keeping my posture erect because my skeleton isn’t doing it on its own.
I sometimes wonder if there is a voodoo curse on me because it has felt like I’ve had a knife stuck between my shoulder blades for 15 years now. Those rhomboid muscles are constantly tight and unable to relax. Then I start to wonder if my pain is karma or something that I’ve created in the past. Maybe I’m currently creating bad karma in the present with wrong thoughts? Buddhists live by the code; right mind, right thought and right action. It’s just so hard to have good thoughts when you’re in chronic pain. In the past I had often been angry with God because he was the one who created my defective spine, or allowed it to grow and the way it did. Oh, and I’ve been very upset with the malice doctors who say it’s all in my head…FU. They are mostly covert narcissists full of malignant self love anyway.
It’s really hard to explain pain to someone else. I cannot explain what a skunk smells like to someone who has never smelled a skunk. How can I explain my experience of the debilitating pain scheuermanns causes me? We have a really neat feature in our brains where we cannot remember pain. We understand that pain is unpleasant, but we cannot ‘think’ about pain and make our adrenaline glands squirt into our mouths. Women would never have a second child if they could hold on to the memory of pain from baring their first child. This brain feature is why it is very difficult to find compassion in others when we talk about our back pain and discomfort. It is not human nature to understand others pain because of narcissistic issues caused by socialization from a very young age. We all have a certain level of narcissism. When someone approaches us and says they’re in pain, we immediately take inventory of our own pain and project that into the communications. It’s really a boundary issue of not validating others.
In the past I’ve wrote pages on what addiction is and I might put some up here. I think there are a lot of people in the midst of severe prescription drug additions because of their pain and they simply don’t know where to turn. The real problem with addictions is that the only way out is through self-love. Learning to love oneself in a similar way that Gods’ loves runs unconditionally. It’s just so hard to love oneself, when we live in a world of chronic pain and in a society where compassion isn’t profitable.
Thanks for reading and remember, we are spiritual beings living in human bodies. Learning to transcend our imprisoned bodies may be the end of suffering. Read as much as you can on Buddhism and transcendental meditations.
Mark O.
