Day Four At The Hospital

Why I’m In The Hospital

For about a year, every few weeks, I would wake up in the night with debilitating back pain. I would do stretches, put my body in different positions, take hot baths or showers, take Advil, and do anything I could to manage the pain, but nothing really helped — though the Advil could take the edge off the pain (maybe if I had tried a bigger dosage it would have been more helpful).

The pain would last a couple of days, and it would build until I was nauseous and then I would break out in a sudden full-body sweat — I might vomit, or just retch, and then it would be over.

I do a quite a bit of physical renovation work, so the first times this happened, I tried to track it to recent projects — had I strained my back moving rubble bags? Or adding a topcoat to the floor? But there was no connection I could observe, so I ruled that out.

Then I wondered if it was an aging thing. There are a million memes about waking up with new pains every day once you’re past 40, so maybe this was just part of aging.

And then I was reading an article about perimenopause, and got curious: I did a search for perimenopause and back pain, and sure enough, the results said that yes, a drop in certain hormones can definitely lead to back pain. I was already wondering if those moments where the pain got so intense, and I broke out into an instant all-over sweat, were like my version of hot flashes, so experiencing this as a perimenopause issue made sense. To manage the back pain, the articles recommended exercises for strengthening my back.

Most of the time, the back pain wasn’t happening, and my life is full enough that when it wasn’t happening, I wasn’t thinking about it at all. While I was experiencing the pain, I would just do my best to continue living my life. When the pain stopped, I immediately moved on. The pain was awful, but it only lasted a couple of days. I figured that this is just how it was going to be until I reached menopause.

Then, a week ago on Monday, the pain started again, but this time it never stopped. By Friday, I was pretty exhausted from the pain and from not being able to sleep, and decided I needed to see a doctor. We called the medical hotline here in our community, spoke with a doctor, and they said it sounded like it was a gynecological issue, and sent me to the gynecology department at the hospital (which is luckily, very near our home).