Pain tears gardener from plants

It lurks in gardens among the potatoes and beans when one is absentmindedly weeding. It hides under the giant leaves of ligularia plants when the gardener is about to dig and divide them. It waits for an unwitting victim’s thoughts to dance off to delightful places where it is the furthest thing from the mind. One moment it isn’t present and the next moment it is paralyzing the gardener in fear.

It is sciatica, a disease of the back and if it afflicts you, the very sound of the word grips your soul in terror. Sciatica occurs when nerves of the spinal column somehow come under excruciatingly painful pressure, rendering one literally immobile. Most often the condition occurs during heavy lifting or soon thereafter when simply bending over to do something benign, such as, say, brush one’s teeth. Horrific pain shoots up, down and every which way across the lower back and legs and the afflicted person has a nearly impossible time standing, sitting, walking and even thinking straight.

Once one is able to lie on the floor in the family room, there is nothing to do but grow intimately aware of the pattern of paint swirls on the ceiling above and become overly critical about the shade of paint, no matter how pleasing it appeared before one’s imprisonment there. There on the rug. For hours. For days.

Ssssccciaaaaticcccca … It sort of hisses and punches at the same time, doesn’t it? I have a bone to pick with this nasty disorder. Let me tell you why.

In the garden a couple of weeks ago, while tending to plant division, kneeling and bending over raised beds, out of a clear blue sky, it struck me. It had visited me before on several occasions, so I knew what I was in for. “Oh no,” I thought in terror, “not now. Not when I have so much work to do.” But it didn’t care. I’d bent forward a fraction of an inch too far and the white-hot pain pounced from the center of my lower back and radiated out left and right. I tried to lift my head, and that motion required great effort. With the help of my spade – which is now, in my mind, officially a medical instrument – I slowly winched myself to my feet.

I waddled up the road to the house, noting along the (very slow-moving) way that living out in the boondocks has its upsides and this awkward trip I was experiencing was one of them. No one could see me taking itty-bitty steps, thoughtfully placing one foot in front of the other, making progress 3 inches at a time.

On the other hand, it struck me: No one could see me! What if I hadn’t been able to hoist myself up? I could have laid in the garden for hours and no one would have found my paralyzed figure until the turkey buzzards circled in curiosity above. No, that’s not true. My children would have gotten hungry and torn their attention away from summer reading long enough to search me out, inquiring what was for lunch. “They would have saved me,” I thought.

My mind had plenty of time to digress on the trip between the garden and house. The little 100-foot jaunt took about 15 minutes drenched in painful agony and I had a lot of time to think about what had put me in its clutches. I recalled my endeavor over the past weeks constructing raised beds with fresh hemlock boards. I’d handled the heavy things without much awareness toward my back. I’d dug holes, heaved rocks, stooped pulling weeds and had done a whole bunch of back-intensive work without a thought about it. But it was lurking. It was lurking under the nearby Lady’s Mantle when I dug the trenches to place the boards. It was skulking by the bluebird box as I dragged the lumber past. It was snickering when I removed a monumental boulder from the corner of the garden.

It. It. It. It was about to ruin my month, little did I know.

Sciatica is one thing. But what precipitated from there is a whole other thing entirely. Here’s what happened: My wobbling – babying the muscles and nerves in my spine by walking around with my pelvis tipped forward and taking minute steps to traverse hither and yon – caused my left hip to get out of whack. Compensating for my hurting hip caused the tendons in my right knee to explode. I treated the sciatica with heat, ice and frequent visits to the chiropractor’s office, where the staff frequently mistakes me for the cash cow. The hip problem came and went in a few days. The knee problem is lingering on, I think, perhaps, for the holidays.

“What’s the matter with Diana?” people ask my husband as I wobble past, gritting my teeth and wincing in pain. “She hurt her back, hip and then knee gardening,” he replies. “Gardening’s supposed to be therapeutic,” they say.

This thoughtful conversational exchange – which I tell you has been repeated at least a dozen times over the past week – makes me cringe, and not from the pain. It’s a reminder that while I impatiently await healing to take place, the garden, and its weeds, grow. To add insult to injury, in my absence Mr. Groundhog has taken up residence nearby, making evening forays to the Echinacea and every plant member of the amaranth and coreopsis families. But that’s another story entirely.

What shall we do about it? Next week I’ll share with you some things I’ve learned in the moments I’ve been able to crawl from the floor to the computer to self-treat using the Internet, that is, if they don’t find me out in the garden with winged creatures circling above.

Diana George Chapin is the NEWS garden columnist. Send horticulture questions to Gardening Questions, 512 North Ridge Road, Montville 04941 or e-mail dianagc@midcoast.com. Selected questions will be answered in future columns. Include name, address and telephone number.