When you’ve got a nerve and the nerve gets you

For the past couple of months I’ve been laid low with a strange affliction, one my mother used to get. She’d be thoroughly miserable when it struck.

As typically thoughtless kids, we’d go ‘‘sorry you’re crook again, Mum…what’s for tea?’’ Now I know what she went through, and I’m remorseful.

Sciatica is a bugger of a thing. It descends on you like a runaway train and is caused when the longest nerve in the body – one that runs from your ear to your ankle – throws a wobbly because of something you’ve done to your lower back.

In my case, it seemed to arrive for no good reason than a brisk walk up out of Pukekura Park followed by mowing the neighbour’s lawns.

Bang. That night there’s agonising pain in my left hip and my upper thigh goes as numb as a block of ice.

I can’t get out of bed next morning. The pain is so intense I borrow some codeine pills Lin never got round to using when she fell over and injured herself a couple of years back.

They help, so initially I’m thinking I’ll probably survive.

But a weekend later I’m confronted with approaching a public medical system that’s in worse condition than I’ll ever be. That is, the emergency department at base hospital.

I don’t want to bother our medical centre because I know how stretched they are. But in the end I try ringing. I talk to nurses on the phone, get referred to a physio.

When I do get an appointment, the doc diagnoses sciatica and assembles an impressive list of various pain killers of graduated power, beginning with poostopping Tramadol and descending to Panadol.

I’ve never needed anything stronger than Disprin, but I learn that’s been withdrawn.

No good for your insides, apparently, although mine never seemed to mind in the half century I imbibed.

She also warns me the attack might take up to 12 weeks to heal. That strikes me as oddly precise. So I’m on Dr Google when I get home. Of course. And there it is – 12 weeks.

That seems a lifetime as it unfolds, marked weekly by physio sessions during which I’m assured the slow progress I’m making is as expected.

Her gently probing fingers are applied to my hip and lower back, which aren’t the sore bits. Those are in the upper thigh, which begins an extraordinary process of gradual thaw. It’s all connected.

Week on week it hurts on different parts as numbness recedes with imperceptible regard for time.

It remains so tender I have to wear loose trackies, not used since my recovery days from a prostatectomy 13 years ago.

I can’t stand up to pee, I can’t walk without sticks, I can’t sleep on my usual side, I can’t put the rubbish bins out (now a job requiring a degree), I can’t travel in the car in comfort because I feel every bump and pothole, I can’t… well, you’ve got the picture.

I disappear from social contact. People may assume I have Covid, but there isn’t even an opportunity to catch that

It’s all very inconvenient. I have three books on the go, but can’t sit at the PC for long. Ah, the PC. Are you to blame for all this? I wonder. I’ve spent my life hunched over keyboards.

People have commented on my appalling posture. Officially, I’m six foot tall, but look like a hunched Gandalf the size of Bradley Walsh.

A mate once said he’d noticed my crooked back and suggested I could fix it if I slept with a weight hanging off the end of the bed and attached to my left ankle with string. I ignored him.

The worst thing is managing the pills. Have you ever noticed that in their efforts to make various pills distinguishable from each other, pill companies manufacture them in various shapes, sizes and degrees of slippery-ness inadvertently designed to defy gravity?

Some pop easily out of their sachets while others require the strength of an arm-wrestling champion. And if you don’t aim right, the freed pill will bounce off any hard surface and go under the bed.

If I’m ever able to kneel on the floor again I know I’ll find half a pharmacy.

If or when this happens again – and I’m warned it could – I’m comforted by the thought at least I won’t have to rush off to the chemist to stock up.

I disappear from social contact. People may assume I have Covid, but there isn’t even an opportunity to catch that.