43 Weeks of Sobriety- Spanner in the works.

Things are about to get a little more challenging, and I need your help...

Feb 14, 2023

Today I have been sober for 43 weeks. 301 days.

It’s always nice to bring up another milestone. I guess the significance of 300 days is that it brings me closer to that 365-day or one-year mark, which will be a nice little feather in the cap if I’m fortunate enough to achieve it.

To take a nugget of wisdom from Matt Breen of

Running for Resilience

, and apply it to my own circumstances; I’m choosing to see it as going one day sober at a time, 301 times. It’s a nice little reminder to focus on what’s directly in front of you, not get too far ahead, and worry about controlling only what you can control.

Sobriety

Sobriety has been going well. I only want to touch on something I forgot to mention the other week when I struggled with sleep. I’ve been thinking about it over the last couple of days, and on reflection, I think it is a little more significant than I previously thought.

During that fortnight or so, where I was struggling to sleep, on a couple of occasions, I thought to myself, I could get drunk, and that would put me to sleep. I dismissed it as a silly, negative thought at the time. Since then, I’ve found myself revisiting the thought and wondering if there is a little more to it.

My favourite day to drink was Sunday. I loved drinking any day of the week, but Sundays were special. If I hadn’t had a massive night the night before, I would do any running around I needed to get done of a morning, then retire home and start drinking around lunchtime. I never got completely blotto. I would steadily drink as I poked around the house or backyard, getting jobs done. Housework/yardwork seemed so much easier if I were drinking simultaneously. by roughly 8 pm, I would have everything done and be organised for the week ahead. Feeling nice and toasty, often from a bit of sunburn, I’d head off to bed and get what I thought was a good night’s sleep, telling myself in the morning I was “fresh” after having such a good sleep.

Of course, now I know that alcohol significantly impacts your sleep quality. In other words, I may have been getting a solid eight or nine hours of sleep, but the quality of sleep was poor due to being drunk when I was asleep.

Whenever I was on night shift, I would race home from work to beat the sunrise because it was always much easier to fall asleep if you could get to bed before the sun came up. If I got home an hour or more before sunrise, I would drink as much as possible until sunrise. This was never about being social. It wasn’t even about being drunk or drinking. It was about getting drunk enough to fall asleep easily.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing, and I’m not sure how much I can gain from investing mental energy into this, but I can’t help but wonder how much of my drinking was fuelled by that irrational fear of not being able to sleep?

Spanner in the Works

On Saturday, I spoke on the phone with my dad. He started telling me how he tore his glute playing golf. He asked me whether or not I thought I had ever had issues with my glutes, given my history of sciatica, hip, and lower back pain. Confidently, I told him no. I went on to say that I'd been feeling good since I had gotten my sleep hygiene back in order. I told him how in the previous week, I had been running well and was starting to feel really good about the running events I had booked myself in for and the goals I had set for them.

Famous, last, fucking, words.

Physically, I had been feeling good for the last week or so. I was back to running close to 5-minute kilometres while predominately remaining in Zone 2.

I have set some lofty yet achievable goals for my running this year. My fitness had taken a bit of a hit during the fortnight or so when I struggled with sleep. At the time, negative thoughts started to creep into my head. I started to think I no longer had a chance of hitting the targets I had set for myself, so to not only be back to running a decent pace/HR ratio but also feel good in doing so, I was pretty fuckin’ happy to be back on track.

On Sunday, I allowed myself a little sleep in. I’d been for a cruisy little trail run in the heat earlier that morning. I was watching the UFC, eating snacks and taking it easy. Fucking bliss.

I don’t remember what it was in particular, but I remembered wandering over to my computer desk to look for something. I got to my desk and can’t remember doing anything in particular. I think I had completed my step, and I don’t think I twisted or moved in any way. That’s when I felt this incredible shooting pain run from the bottom of my spine directly up in a straight line to the middle of my back. Then it was as though it hit a T-junction, and it shot at perfect right angles across to what my GP called my “flanks”!

It… was fucked.

I called out to my partner. When she entered the room, I was hunched over like a 90-year-old man holding a walking frame. She asked me what was wrong. All I could say at the time was, “I think something has happened”… No shit, Sam.

I couldn’t move, and I was fucking terrified. I hadn’t been stuck standing like that since the 2014 Big Day Out on The Gold Coast, where I took way too many pingas and blacked out for Pearl jam’s entire set.

How could something so fucking innocuous leave me semi-paralyzed?

Gradually, it freed up just enough to shuffle over to the lounge. I just felt like I wanted to lay on my stomach and arch my back, but I couldn’t. Laying on my stomach was too uncomfortable. I tried lying on the ground, but that was no good either. Eventually, I could use every fucking lounge cushion in Batemans Bay to set myself up with my legs flat on the lounge and my back at a 45-degree angle.

In a way, I wish I hadn’t got comfortable because once I did, my mind started racing, and the panic set in.

Straight away, I thought it was disc related. I’d had a bulging disc at the ripe old age of 12. My dad had two herniated discs when he was younger. His incident was a little more hardcore. He was sweeping leaf litter out of his trailer at the tip when he dropped like a sack of shit onto the trailer floor. My mum has had bulging discs in the past as well. My late grandma had scoliosis, and in the later years of her life, it was so bad that I swear the tallest point of her body was the tip of her shoulder rather than the top of her head. My cousin has had surgery to remove two prolapsed discs from his back and replaced them with fancy new silicone ones. He also had to have some stuff done to tidy up some of his nerves. His brother has also had surgeries on his back to tidy up a few nerve problems.

So yeah, I was fucking shitting myself.

The next morning I woke feeling ok. I tried to get into a doctor first thing. Because I’ve only lived where I live for the last six months, I haven’t had to see a doctor here yet. Not one fucking medical practice within a 30km radius of me was taking on new patients, which speaks volumes about the health system in regional Australia. After spending half an hour trying and failing to secure an appointment locally, I rang my family GP in Canberra (2 hours away) to see if they could squeeze me in that day. Luckily I was able to get an appointment that same afternoon. So I drove four hours with a really fucking sore back just to get a referral for an X-Ray, which I had done yesterday.

I had the X-ray done yesterday and have a chiropractor appointment on Friday morning. On Sunday, I had pain all over. Apparently, that is from the muscles in my back tensing up to protect the area that has been damaged. That has since dissipated, but I’m not getting more localised and sharp pain on the left side of my lower back, my left hamstring, my left calf and the centre of my back where the initial shot of pain went to.

I’m following all the right steps to get the issue resolved, and although both sobriety and being a father have given me a greater level of patience, it still fucking sucks, and I just want it fixed. I had sciatica issues last September, which I could fix through physio and stretching. But given my history with back problems, my family’s history with back problems and the innocuous nature in which this happened, I am fucking terrified.

It sucks that I may not be able to participate in the running events I’ve signed up for, but deep down, that’s the least of my worries. On Sunday night, my son was getting upset, as nearly six-month-olds do. Instinctively, I picked him up and started to rock him to comfort him. The pain in my back was fucking excruciating. That’s when the gravity of all of this really hit me.

My health and fitness are and have been important to me for some time now, not just so that I can try to extend my lifespan but to live a longer life in good, active health. That’s when the questions started flying around in my head. What if I can’t rock the big fella to sleep anymore? Lift him in and out of his baby seat or pram? What if this is some kind of degenerative thang, and as he grows up, I deteriorate even further? The more he wants me to do things with him, the less I can. What if I have to commit the ultimate sin and pay some other fucker to mow MY lawn!? This shit matters to me. It affects me. I started to feel like I was a disappointment to him before I had even begun the process of figuring out what had actually happened to me.

For a moment, I found myself feeling like this was all so unfair. I have done so many good things in the nearly 10 months I have been sober. Why am I being punished like this? Some real, woe is me, pity party type shit, where no one is invited. Just leave me in the corner to carry on like a flog.

Dramatic and highly unlikely, I know. But I couldn’t help the places my mind wandered at that moment.

Mostly though, and perhaps selfishly, I’m scared that I may have had some of my healthiest coping mechanisms taken away from me for a period of time. Since I have been sober, I have relied so heavily on exercise to manage my mental health and sobriety. At the moment, I’ve been instructed to do nothing until I get the X-ray results back and hear from my doctor about what to do next.

They say the best predictor of the future is the past, and that fuckin’ terrifies me. In the past, I have been all in, no matter what I do. If I were going through a period where I was drinking a lot and taking a lot of drugs, I would also be eating, sleeping and training like shit. Looking back at photos of me over the last 15 years, I can tell what my mental health was like simply by how I looked. I wouldn’t just get fat. I would get fat and unkempt. You can see I just didn’t give a shit. The inverse is true too. When things are good, they’re good. I train consistently. I sleep well and don’t become a stranger to the barber.

But what the fuck do I do if I can’t do the things I know work so well to manage my mental health and sobriety? Obviously, I need to find alternatives, and professionals may well guide that, but I am naturally averse to trying new things. I know I need to work on that, and this may well force my hand, but it’s fucking scary. Given what’s at stake, I feel like I don’t have time to fuck around with different things that may not work.

My garden at the new house is finally starting to produce plenty of veggies, which is great. Growing veggies is something I’ve been doing ever since we brought our first house three years ago. It brings me this overwhelming sense of calm, just poking around in the garden picking at shit, trimming stuff and whatever else. But I can’t exactly head out and rip into any real yard work.

I’ve been learning guitar for the last fortnight, and I get a similar result. I’m really enjoying it. It calms me down, distracts me from the stressors around me, and gives me these consistent little nuggets of a sense of achievement. It’s something that I think I’ll continue to do, hopefully forever.

I’m just so scared, and I’m looking for help. If I am forced to remove exercise from my daily routine, I am worried that maintaining my fitness, weight, mental health, and, ultimately, my sobriety will be much harder. I’ve worked way too fucking hard to get to this point, and with 12 months just around the corner, I am concerned it’ll start to weigh on my mind more than it should and make things harder again.

Any and all recommendations or suggestions are welcome.

Cheers Wankers.

43 Weeks of Sobriety- Spanner in the works.

Things are about to get a little more challenging, and I need your help...

Sobriety

Spanner in the Works

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