Welcome back to If You Can Make It Here, a diary about New York and new beginnings.
Hello from the Abracadabra Magic Cafe, a Turkish-mediterranean experiment hung in beads and mosaic. The AMC is new and still finding its groove but Ahmed reckons he can seat as all at the bar, with heaping plates of cuminy scrambled egg and flatbread and enough homemade hot sauce to go around. Which is good because we are 92 now, and we have just gone to the gym round the corner, and... everything hurts. In a way that hurt should not.
When, in your life, did you feel most weak? Even if you can point to exactly the time, you probably can’t summon the feeling, and maybe that’s a small blessing. We speak of a moment of weakness as something to be encountered, got through, moved on from. Come back from - stronger! Whatever doesn’t kill you, right?
Here is the thing that did not kill me.
I truly love my gym. Fuerza Training Systems lies between where I live and the cafe I most often work in, so I couldn’t help but walk past it in my first weeks. Fuerza — Spanish for strength — is different. Where most gyms hold hundred of anonymous (unused) machines like Henry Ford’s factory but for muscle, this place is the size of a few garages stuck together, only takes ten people at a time, and only for specific sessions. You are supervised. You are cared about. Over time, you see the same people in the same time slot - everyone else who squeezes in the hour before work for themselves, or uses iron to wind down in the evening. You know them well enough to say hi to. Hi! In the gym!
It was May when I first put down a root at Fuerza. When January rolled around, the owner pulled me aside and said, it’s your Max Week. I had been dreading this week, to the extent that I was pretty sure I was supposed to have done it already, and had decided that if they weren’t going to remember, I wasn’t going to remind them.
Max Week is the week where you discover, though trial and failure, how heavy a weight you can lift in a specific way if you only have to do it for one repetition. This entails two experiences: the first, lifting the heaviest weight you’ve ever lifted. The second, failing to lift something a couple of lbs heavier than that.
As it turns out, the voices in your head make all the difference. In the moment of lift I couldn’t hear my own doubts, I could only hear trainers screaming in a way that would in real life make me stop and say do you MIND? but here left that complaint with nowhere to go but into the bar, into 175 lbs of iron, into a record deadlift, into ecstasy.
Into, one week later, a pain. We’ve all pushed ourselves too far; we all know what that feels like. This was different, as though a pulled muscle had threaded its way from my lower back, through my buttcheek and thigh, down the left side. When I stood up, or sat wrong, the thread heated like solder. If I really pushed it, it tugged at my left calf. I “took it easy”, which is the thinking man’s version of “ignore it, and don’t talk about it.” Then I happened to mention the pain to a good friend. That is sciatica, she messaged. It’s serious! I had it for months and couldn’t do ANYTHING. Go see the person I saw.
Note:
Describing navigating the US healthcare system would bring this post, like most people, to its knees, so I won’t. In summary, though:
-For anyone in Europe: the system is as bad as they say, but the people inside the system are *not* that system - and they do everything they can to help you through it.
-For anyone in the US: if you didn’t know already, Zocdoc is the service you want to use to get you through it. It’s the kind of thing the state is really supposed to build, but oh well.
Dr Roberto F Mancuso MD MPH had carefully pomaded hair and thin glasses and a salesman’s voice. Which was good, because I wanted to be sold an answer. He told me that what I felt was common for someone doing what I was doing. He booked me for an MRI, a followup appointment after that, and gave me a prescription of steroids.
Six days of steroids passed like a miracle. Simply: the pain went away. There was a strange feeling of pressure and weight but it didn’t hurt; so much so that with Dr Mancuso’s blessing, I went to Fuerza a couple of times, staying off my legs. On the fifth day, I went for my MRI and wondered whether I really needed it.
On the seventh day I woke up early to head to the appointment, and it took me a full minute to stand. The dimensions of my modest Queens apartment expanded; tables, chairs and counters were now islands of stability, and getting between each was something to prepare for and recover from. The steroids hadn’t taken the pain away; they’d simply post-dated it. When I got to Mancuso’s office I wasn’t so much offered a seat as mandated one. I refused, because sitting down would mean, at some point, getting up.
He looked at the scans, pleased with himself: it was what he had thought, and we could start treatment today. Two minutes later — it would have been one if I could walk properly — I was lying face down on a massage table while an articulated mechanical arm took aim at my lower back. Localised x-ray vision. Things were getting very spinal, very fast. This would be a cortisol epidural: the same stuff I’d taken in tablet form, now concentrated into a knockout blow and delivered directly to the problem. Mancuso put in the line. “You’ll feel a kind of pressure.” He flipped a switch, the arm made a sound like a tyre pump, and I gasped — my whole leg was inflating, bursting. The thread of pain exhaled into a balloon snake. Thirty seconds of pain that I couldn’t escape even if I wanted to. When it was over, he said, “You can get up, when you’re ready.”
I said, “How?”
I didn’t so much get up as fall carefully off the table. The leg belonged to someone else. They gave me a carton of apple juice meant for kids, and left me in a side room to recover. I hobbled in tiny circles like a wounded animal, because to sit still would have been to sit with the sensation, and not move it through me. But the real experience was to come.
Mancuso had said it would take a couple of hours to kick in — in the meantime, I had to get to work. This involved transferring from the R train to the L, at Union Square. This is a bit like the Leicester Square of Manhattan: busy above, busy below, thick with currents of people. People with no time for me and my L4-5 extruded disc herniation, causing a small ventral impression on the thecal sac.
A moment of weakness is one thing. It is something else to live with weakness. To walk with it. As I’d left Mancuso’s office, the Manhattan brass door was so heavy it felt like a personal insult, installed to spite me. Now, lost in the Lewis Carollean signage of the New York subway system, I had become the thing I hated the most: an obstacle. Another train erupted commuters onto the platform; they sprang and pirouetted around each other and for the first time I didn’t move with them. It was all I could do to lurch out of the flow and into one of those dead spaces of the city; the kind of liminal spacial elbow where you might find a mop and bucket, or a person who’s been left behind. When the people had gone I made for the stairs. I only had to put one foot on the bottom step for my thecal sac to erupt in anger. Panting for breath, I looked back down the platform for a way out - and for the first time, I realised that while the Metropolitan Transit Authority loves putting up signs that tell you a station has a lift, they’re less keen on signs to tell you where that lift might be. I thought: It’ll take a long time to get where you’re going, and it’ll hurt.
Sitting uncomfortably at the bar stool of the Abracadabra Magic Cafe, I wish I had something with back support — but Ahmed won’t give up table to seats to laptop users on the weekends, and that is his right. But the cortisol is seeping into where it needs to go, and I have been to the gym, at least for the sake of my upper body and my mind. Another shot of miracle juice this Thursday, and who knows what might happen. Ahmed is talking to the person next to me, Natasha; they have a bond already because they both, it turns out, see themselves as healers; he through food and she through ayahuasca. “Living is the process of dying well,” says Ahmed. Natasha looks up from her Golden Milk Latte, “Exactly!”
As so what is weakness? It is not the opposite of strength. In my seat now, as down in the underworld, every single movement and adjustment is contemplated first, and executed slowly in conversation with my body, as I try to hear whatever it has to say. If weakness is where you viscerally experience the exact limits of what your body or mind or soul can bear, at every moment of the day, as opposed to living in some fantasy story of The Endless Becoming… if that is true, then weakness can be seen as the arena in which we really encounter our strength. Limited as it is. Conditional as it is, temporary as it is. Mysterious as it is.
Living is the process of dying well. Strength is the process of befriending your weakness.
Warm-Down
☞ For the benefit of lawyers reading (I know of two), I got my injury at the gym, not from the gym. I was given really good lifting guidance (tldr: activate your core, protect your back), and in the excitement to progress I wasn’t following it. Now I’m starting again, and with it comes extra guidance, and new awareness of what I can do, and what I can’t. The friend who first told me what I was facing also described how special her regained movement now felt. I’m not there yet, by any means, but my slow trip through the subway did begin to show me what she meant.
☞ She wasn’t the only one. Other friends got in touch with their own lumbar woes: worse incidents than mine, with worse consequences, but all had come out the other side, having gained something by losing something. A therapist once said to me, feeling pain does not separate you from the rest of humanity. In fact, it brings you closer to humanity by making a part of our shared experience: suffering. So, in a continuation of Issue 3: don’t just ask for help, share your pain. Sensitively, gently. Maybe someone else wants to share theirs.
☞ Finally — yes. The title of this issue is a gentle reference to Ewen MacIntosh, who UK readers will remember playing “Big Keith” in The Office (2001), and who sadly passed away last week. The scene where David Brent asks him to appraise his own Strengths and Weaknesses is a masterclass in naturalistic comedy, and Quiet Quitting. RIP Ewen.
And that’s me, for now. I’m off to put a hot water bottle in the sore places. Thank you, as ever, for reading.
Issue 6 will be the 11th of March. Last of Winter!
Until then: may you let your weakness show. And never pass up a good scotch egg.
James
from Ridgewood, Queens
My L5/S1 microdisectomy *high fives* your L4-5 extruded disc herniation.
This issue is, I think, my favourite so far, because it really has everything, and not just the visceral and-yet-deeply-funny description of the sciatic agony it turns out we have both experienced. Beautifully done. Also, your friend is right: the regained movement is special, I hope it returns to you soon. Rich calls this “the joy of normal”, and it really is.
All my genuine strength has come from embracing my weakness. I hope your L4-5 continues to heal. Thank you for sharing what you’ve learned. I’ll leave you with my late maternal grandmother’s words of wisdom “it’s Mother Nature’s way of telling you to rest dear” 🧡