Despite my enormous interest in all military and history related I am not going to discuss the actual battle known as the bloodiest in the history of the US per Wikipedia. Nor will I reflect on the whole Ardennes offensive alltogether.

Instead I will bring up a somewhat mundane subject - my health. I have been an athlete pretty much all my life. Going from one sport to the next I ended up falling in love with beach volleyball. Hence the nickname (Sideout). Lately however I have been experiencing some intermittent lower back pains. They were getting pretty annoying as they would resurface pretty much after every other weekend of volleyball. So finally I decided to get more insight into the matter and went to an MRI facility next to my house. A week later the verdict was delivered to me in a form of a phone call from my doctor - I had a disk bulge in my lower back.

If you ever been competitive in any kind of sport you would know that injuries are unavoidable and imminent. My collection of injuries includes but is definitely not limited to a fractured nose, cracked teeth, rolled ankles, fractured fingers, multiple cuts and endless number of bruises. However anytime I would get injured it would sort of rub off of me pretty quickly. And I would get back into formation like nothing ever happened. This current injury seemed to have stuck around longer than I had wanted it to making me utterly frustrated. I am no longer in my twenties. Don’t believe that thirties are the new twenties no matter how many times you hear it on national television. And this was a harsh reminder.

I was in the doctor’s office the next morning. Apparently the word concern was written all over my face. So he quickly pacified me by saying that this was in no way a “career ending injury”. I do not have a career as a professional athlete mind you.  However I do live a very active lifestyle. And would hate to see it slip away like that. Well, I would not have to. My bulge is very little - 3mm in size. That constitutes a small bulge as opposed to a severe bulge which would be over 7mm. And apparently had I not been an active bastard I probably would not have even noticed it ever existed. However I am an active bastard. Therefore measure should be taken.

The next couple of months I would have to be doing a lot of physical therapy and therapeutic exercises like back stretches and swimming. Now the last one creates somewhat of an issue - I passionately hate swimming. I have never been good at endurance sports. Explosive sports were my forte. Swimming much like running and cross country skiing is a tedious sport according to my book. If I were to run a marathon or a triathlon I would probably die of boredom before exerting myself into oblivion. However amends should be made. I told myself to suck it up and dove into the pool. I am swimming 2-3 times per week now while grinding my teeth in hate.

My doctor told me that in a few months of all this the MRI should not even show my bulge. This is the kind of thinking that should get me through the miles of swimming, hours of stretching and absolutely tasteless healthy food meals that I would endure in the next couple of months. I shall prevail in the battle of the bulge.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, May 20th, 2009 at 2:35 pm and is filed under Life. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.