When I was a young lad, in about sixth grade, we had a cold spell. Growing up on Puget Sound, we didn’t get honest, bona fide freezing temperatures all that often, so it was something of a novelty. Not knowing any better, I sprayed down our concrete patio with the hose, and let it freeze. Then I sprayed it down again. After a couple of layers, it was a sheet of ice.
This was great fun. I was sliding around in my sneakers, and goofing off. And then my feet slipped out from under me, and I came crashing down on the ice, landing on my tailbone. I don’t remember anything other than it hurting a lot. Being young, I didn’t seek any sort of medical attention. Of course not.
In junior high, aside from all the other difficulties I had in P.E., I had real trouble doing situps. Not for the reason you might think, but because it was exquisitely painful to rock up onto my tailbone. I had to do situps on either my right side, or my left side. At this point it began to occur to me that maybe I had screwed up something in my coccyx.
Years went by, and I developed a number of aches and pains too numerous to list in any detail. As I aged, however, that pain in my tailbone got progressively worse. Now, I’ve reached the point where it aches pretty much all the time.
It’s usually bearable, but every now and then I do something that aggravates the situation, and then I’m in real pain. It’s almost impossible to find a comfortable position, even laying down, and there aren’t any exercises and stretches that help, because this is pain inside the bone, and well below even the lower vertebrae.
So, after working in the yard last weekend, I’ve been fighting a nasty episode of aching tailbone this week. Even with my wonderful office chair, sitting down all day really hurts. This is all coming on top of the incident with the dog, and in conjunction with a couple of other issues in my life right now, and it’s put me in a pretty foul mood.
If you had told me when I was 12 that a moment’s idiocy sliding around on the ice would be paying painful dividends every day when I was in my forties, I would never have believed you.