Before this post starts, I want to invite you to take a brief survey that will help me decide on the future direction of my creative work
I’ve written many drafts of something to share in the last few months, but nothing has felt quite right. Each time I try to sit down to write a post, my mind loses itself in crisscrossing complexities.
I never fully recovered from the back surgeries I had in June and July of 2020. When I finally got to the point, in January of this year, that I felt well enough to get back to the gym and to regular activity, I found that exercise of most sorts would trigger intense muscle spasms for me that could last for weeks. Around that same time, I delved headfirst into working on the vaccine rollout at Walgreens, which quickly became the focal point of my life.
In April, my back condition worsened enough that I went to the ER. After reviewing my MRI, the doctors determined that the re-emergence of numbness, weakness, and nerve pain in my left leg was not caused by anything that called for emergency surgery, but they did recommend that I get a spinal fusion.
Between my 2017 and 2020 surgeries, I’ve just had too many micro-discectomies and laminectomies in my L4-L5 vertebrae.
There was so little disc material left that my L4-L5 vertebrae were virtually bone-on-bone, which caused instability and arthritic pain, as well as more rapid degeneration of other discs throughout the spine (I’ve already developed bulges and recurring muscle spasms in my thoracic spine and cervical spine). Below is an image of the painful pelvic shift I would get intermittently between my June/July 2020 surgeries and my October 2021 surgery.
Multiple surgical teams told me that fusing the L4 and L5 vertebrae would improve stability and decrease the degeneration throughout my spine. I was very skeptical of that suggestion at first. Another surgery was the last thing I wanted. But the medical consensus was unanimous.
Until my spinal fusion, all of my surgeries have been emergency procedures to save me from long-term leg damage, even life-long paralysis. Myu October 14th surgery would be the first of five surgeries to be a choice. It didn’t feel like a choice, though. It felt like surrender.
Even after choosing to go through with the spinal fusion, I felt little ground for optimism. I’ve never had a surgery go smoothly or provide long-term protection. After my first surgery in 2017, I developed an infection in the surgical wound that brought me the closest I’ve ever been to death. My June surgery of 2020 didn’t decompress my spine enough to prevent the return of cauda equina syndrome a week later, and I also developed a dangerous hematoma near the site of the surgery, which both necessitated a second surgery in early July.
My history of rare complications in surgery left me feeling that by choosing spinal fusion, I was betraying my body. Deep in the quiet quarters of my heart, in those rooms I leave locked and guarded, whispers bounced about endlessly telling me that choosing another surgery was choosing death.
But I suppressed those whispers like I suppressed the rest of my life, for a time. I stopped talking to lots of people. I drifted away from friends and family. Even when I continued to speak to them, I couldn’t muster honesty. I turned my frown upside down and put on that well-practiced, cheery disposition that every Mormon boy and girl learns at an early age to mask the problems they don’t know how to solve.
So I busied myself with my job, plant care, obsessively studying Latin, watching TV, eating ice cream, occasionally playing the piano. Each weekend, I avoided people by working obsessively on an essay I intended to publish in the fall for Symposeum Magazine. And, best of all, I adopted a baby African Grey Parrot who captured my heart gave me an excellent reason to stay at home.
The essay I was preparing for Symposeum was supposed to connect my life to Tara Westover’s Educated, but mostly I just wrote out of fragments of memories from my own childhood, compelled by the whispers I felt bouncing in those quiet, guarded quarters. I started shaking gently at the door, trying to find my way through.
Unfortunately, the essay outgrew the time and energy I would have needed to publish it based on the magazine’s timeline, but I have no idea what the experience of my October 14th surgery would have been without the keys I unearthed through the writing process that finally granted me access to those long-sealed chambers of my deepest fears.
Finally, in a moment of bravery, I opened the door.
And there I was one night so many years ago when my cousin Michael convinced me to sneak out of the house, and I was terrified and refused to follow.
And there I was when he ran over my leg with a four-wheeler and convinced me to tell my mom I’d tripped over a barbed-wire fence.
And there I was on the lawn being choked by Michael, plenty of adults around figuring “boys will be boys” while I wondered, one of many times if I’d ever breathe again.
And there I was in that tree where Michael fell and minutes later lied to his parents, saying I’d pushed him, suddenly discrediting any claim I had to Michael’s abuse. (“Well it was never just Michael,” my aunt said once, “Josh did push him out of that tree.” She must have been the only person to know me and believe me capable of pushing anyone from a tree.)
And there I was, a teenager, Michael telling me how he nearly killed a man at work for not listening to him, an illegal immigrant who couldn’t go to the police.
And then, finally, I was shaking with my back against the wall of his bedroom as Michael held a loaded gun to my head and threatened to pull the trigger over something as trivial as my refusal to tell him who I had a crush on.
And then I realized the feeling that I was going to die wasn’t just about the surgery. It was a habit I’d developed as a child and teenager from spending too much time with a cousin I somehow trusted even when he consistently robbed me of bodily autonomy.
Opening the door to these memories, learning to accurately name what happened (repeated physical and emotional abuse), and learning about the biological and psychological consequences of trauma have clarified much about negative patterns in my life that emerged from Michael’s abuse and the coping mechanisms I developed as a result: suppressing my anger, denying my feelings, dissociating, depersonalizing, avoiding problems, compulsively moving towards stressful, anxiety-inducing relationships and situations.
There’s a lot of evidence that chronic low back pain is correlated to traumatic events in childhood, as well as to the coping mechanisms one develops in response, like anger suppression that results in an inability to control distress.
I want to make two things abundantly clear.
First:
Michael Harold lies pathologically and achieves sadistic glee when physically torturing people. I’ve seen that look of pure joy on his face as he pointed a loaded gun at my head; I’ve seen it when he pulled hair from his sister’s head; and I’ve seen it most recently just two years ago when he physically accosted his younger brother on Christmas Eve in an attempt to force his brother to pay attention to a video message about Christ. Those of us present (including me) just watched and said nothing. If you have suffered at Michael’s hands, you deserve justice. Please do not deny the trauma he’s caused you. He doesn’t need your protection; you need protection from him. It is the responsibility of the people in Michael’s life to hold him accountable for his actions and to prevent him from hurting more people. The consequences of abuse stretch over decades and decades, and I’m far from the only person dealing with the aftermath of his actions.
Second:
I do not at all believe Michael to be solely responsible for my back pain. Chronic back pain of the kind I deal with, unless caused by a specific accident, is brought about by the interaction of a variety of biological, social, and psychological causes. I likely would have been much more resilient to Michael’s abuse or simply had the self-confidence to stop hanging out with him if I hadn’t also been enduring religious trauma induced by being a closeted gay teenager in a church that denounced LGBTQ identities which left me in constant fear of rejection. Given that I’m the fifth generation of men in my family to endure severe back pain, there’s surely some genetic component at work, as well.
Despite the strong premonitions that plagued me, I didn’t die from my spinal fusion. It was painful but successful. In fact, I seem to be recovering at a faster rate than any of my past surgeries. Like the seeds of the Utah Juniper that lay dormant for season after season until the climate finally suits their needs, I feel my hope for the future of my back is finally sprouting.
Most importantly, I’m not going through this alone.
I have family and friends flying out to be with me full-time, and my incredible friend Jenn has organized a rotating cast of friends to stop by each day of the week so that I have consistent visitors to help with my plants, my pets, and my overall wellbeing.
As I lie in bed watching the outside world turn from Summer to Autumn, I feel more peace than I’ve felt in ages. The words of Johne Donne float through my heart, once again, like a prayer for our passage from one era of my life to the next:
Study me then, you who shall lovers be
At the next world, that is, at the next spring
For I am every dead thing In whom
Love wrought new alchemy For his art did express
A quintessence even from nothingness,
From dull privations, and lean emptiness;
He ruin’d me, and I am re-begot
Of absence, darkness, death: things which are not.
Best wishes,
Josh