Author, Speaker, Instructor, Radio Host
It had been a long time coming, but it finally happened.
My closest friends tell me I ought to learn how to play poker. I have a very convincing game face when it comes to certain things. My wife thinks my pride, and my inability to let how I feel inside to reach the outside, are the reasons why my Worker's Compensation case, which ended about a year ago, didn't go too well for me.
Earlier this week my chronic pain issues got the best of me, and they landed me in the emergency room. I went to the hospital essentially kicking and screaming. Well, not literally, but it was not my idea to give in and admit I was hurting. Mrs. Pistachio, however, knows me well enough that she could see what was going on in my eyes. She watched me as I struggled out of bed, and then was unable to rise to my feet.
"That's it, I'm taking you to the VA," she said.
She forced me into the car, drove me down to San Diego, and once I was finally able to see the doctor, an I.V. was pushed into my left arm with a clear pack full of medicine hanging above me. The medicine was much stronger than what I normally take in a pill form, and gave me some much needed relief form an otherwise pain-filled life.
The story behind my painful predicaments must be told in pieces.
In my current life I carry a few too many pounds, and I am not real active. I have a gym membership that is used once in a long while, and I get winded taking walks with my wife. It has not always been that way.
We all have our "glory days" stories. I once saw a meme that read, "That old guy you make fun of was a bad ass when he was young." Each of us who have more miles behind us than we have before us have stories about what we once were, yours truly included.
I was a long distance runner who at one point was running thirty miles per day. From about the age of 15 to about the ripe old age of 35 I was pumping out two hundred push-ups per day. I played basketball daily in high school, as often as I could in the Navy, and every weekend (and sometimes during the week) during my late twenties and early thirties. I was healthy, fit, lean and mean.
While running is good for you, the years of running took its toll on my knees. Twenty years in the construction industry banged my body up, too. I carried bundles of re-bar on my shoulder, I pounded dowels into the ground with a 4 pound sledge hammer, I operated equipment, I snapped line, ran this way and that, worked on equipment on the occasions it was necessary, and rounded it all out with delivering aggregate materials in the latter years of my construction lifestyle. Among the equipment I operated was a grading tractor, and a trenching machine. We dug the foundations for residential homes. My brother worked in the industry with me, and we used to joke on the jobsite, "Dad said if we didn't go to college we'd be digging ditches for a living. Well, here we are."
As a young man I had colleges looking at me both academically and athletically. But, for some reason, despite the cat-calls from the colleges, and a college fund set up by an aunt, I thought it was a much better idea during the same summer I graduated from high school to get my girlfriend pregnant, get married, and enlist in the U.S. Navy. I had already been talking to United States Marine Corps recruiters (dad, after all, spent some time in the Corps, so I though I ought to, too), but with a family on the way, I liked the educational opportunities offered by the Navy much more.
When I was nineteen I incurred service-connected injuries including damage to my left knee, a left-temporal fracture to my head, hemorrhaged eyes, nervous system damage leaving me with a palsy in the left side of my face along with a constant ringing in my ear, and enough skull damage to also leave me without much of the hearing in my left ear. I worked relentlessly to defy the doctors who were saying I would never walk again, and that I would be severely mentally retarded for the rest of my life. I overcame and left behind my short-term memory issues, I fought back against the new challenges I suddenly was experiencing regarding my decimated high intellect, I grunted with each session as I coerced myself to learn how to walk again (in the beginning dragging my bad leg behind me as my right leg bore all of my weight and efforts), and I decided I was going to defeat a severe seizure disorder that at one time had me bed-ridden due to all of the seizures that were slamming my body. I began in a wheelchair, moved up to a walking cane, and eventually got to the point where I was running and playing basketball, again. I played "Simon" and other memory games to strengthen my ailing memory, and performed as many exercises and tasks to ensure that I got back in the game. I was lifting weights, doing the push-ups again, and performing stretching exercises throughout the day to force loose the stiffening joints that kept wanting me to give in and just become another statistic that is disabled for life after such a massive set of injuries.
My hard work paid off, and eventually I was returned to full duty on a new Navy vessel.
The only things that continue to haunt me now from those days is a constant (and very loud) ringing in my left ear, and a chronic migraine headache problem that reminds me constantly of the severe head injury I had incurred. Everything else, while limitations do continue to exist, can be managed. I have compensated in ways where not only does nobody really notice that I lost an incredible number of digits from my I.Q., but now many folks believe me to be as intelligent as ever. The tinnitus continues to ring, stemming primarily from nerve damage, I am told, and I suffer from the headaches almost daily, but plenty of aspirin (or other products) keep me, for the most part, minimally head-ache ridden. As far as most people know, I've got a perfectly normal past, present, and future.
Physical injuries were incurred again four years ago I was struck by a speeding vehicle on a job-site while delivering sand and gravel in a big rig (a duty I performed during the final six years of my twenty-year construction run). While I was stepping down off of a loader (heavy machinery) a driver of a red pick-up truck decided to use the jobsite as a short-cut. He hit me, knocked me to the ground, and then sped off towards the top of the block. My right shoulder was torn, and I now have bulging discs in my lower back and neck (4.5 mm in five of my lower vertebrae, 3.5 mm in three of the vertebrae in my neck). The resulting Worker's Compensation case, however, didn't go well. The owner of the company I worked for, because I decided to get a lawyer, launched a war against me. The lawyers chewed me up and spit me out, and in the end I was left without a job, and any benefits. The lawyers for the company, and a single doctor, pushed the idea that I was essentially full of it, and that I was fraudulently trying to take advantage of the Worker's Compensation system.
Physically, in relation to the new injuries, I have my good days, and I have my bad days. Their argument, combined with a cherry-picked video of me operating in my daily life without visible pain, killed my case. I felt lucky that they even paid for the medical bills. They determined I do not have the injuries I claim to have, and the fact that the MRIs show me to have shoulder, back, and neck limitations doesn't matter. They claimed, since I was in construction, the injuries were all pre-existing. So, thanks to their effective tactics, I have no benefits, no healthcare, and I have been unable to work a day-to-day job since then. I cannot perform the kinds of jobs I've been trained to do, so my income is essentially completely gone, and on top of all that, the guy who hit me got off scott-free, as well. They even dropped the hit-and-run charge even though there were three witnesses who saw it happen.
It almost felt like a conspiracy against me.
While the pain from the accident four years ago is usually manageable if I properly manage the amount of time I sit and stand, while taking breaks as often as I can (naps have become a regular thing for me), sometimes the pain still gets the best of me. Sciatic pain is the worst part of it. Due to the bulges in my back, of which don't exist according to the Worker's Comp case, my spinal nerve sometimes touches one of those vertebrae, and when that happens, I am down for the count, and there is no amount of medication that can ease that kind of pain. One time it rendered me to very limited operations for two and a half months. But, the cameras weren't rolling when that happened two years ago. While I was suffering through that, the company I once worked for and the Worker's Comp lawyers were doing what they could to keep me from getting a single penny. They surely knew about my pain, and that I wasn't being fraudulent, but that was not the right answer for them. Money was more important than my well-being, or any possibility of me being properly compensated. Therefore, they refused to show any evidence that, even with my very effective game face, that the pain sometimes was powerful enough to even knock me out of commission.
Fast forward to my most recent days. Despite the setbacks and hurdles, I have become very effective as a constitutionalist, hosting a radio program, giving lectures and speeches, writing books and writing on my blog, and serving as an instructor in a variety of capacities (which is now also evolving into a home-school class I have formulated). I work, I push, but I try to manage as well as I can my activities so that the pain does not knock me to my knees. The pay is pennies, but the personal reward of spreading constitutional literacy and encouraging patriotic advocacy is worth it.
Last Monday Morning, however, I lost the battle I constantly fight when it comes to my chronic pain.
The migraine was worse than usual, and even my Excedrin Migraine-Strength regimen was incapable of taming the wild beast clawing at my eyes, my temples, and pounding the base of my skull where it meets the back of my neck. The neck and back decided to kick into high gear as well, leaving me with tremendous nerve pain, and severe numbness and tingling at the tips of all four extremities. I was unable to pull myself out of bed, and the slightest light caused the headache to pound harder, and my tinnitus to scream louder.
My wife put her foot down. While I protested, claiming all I needed to do was rest, and arguing that I had too much work to be spending the day at the Veteran's Administration Hospital in La Jolla, she practically dragged me into the car, belted me in, leaned the seat back, and drove me down there.
After spending the entire morning in the lobby waiting to be seen, mostly holding my head to try to calm the pounding, by the afternoon a doctor began to attend to me. There's nothing they could do about the sciatic nerve pain, but the other pains, including the migraine, would need an I.V.
It's funny. I once continued playing basketball after breaking my finger in the game. I have been in confrontational situations where the pain of combat should have made me less effective. I have fought back from adversity, and I have experienced the pain of physical therapy as I fought back through the impossible. I can handle pain, no problem . . . but for some reason, I am squeamish when it comes to needles.
The blood drawing was bad enough, but the I.V. tube, needle, or whatever you wish to call it, really sucked.
Time slowed to a crawl. I couldn't get comfortable. I didn't like the way the head end of the thing they had me lying on was raised. The beeps in other rooms were like dueling banjos to my ears, constantly annoying and distracting me as I tried to rest and just get through my incarceration as a patient at the VA emergency room.
Finally, the nurse came in and withdrew the long needle out of my arm. The I.V. bag was sucked in like the face of a zombie. All of its contents were now inside my body, and I was beginning to enjoy its happy effects.
After I was finally discharged from the emergency room stay that I largely slept through, my wife was laughing about my sudden recovery. I was happy, laughing, making jokes, and a joy to be around during the dinner at Dennys following my release. She drove us home, and we stayed up past midnight talking and enjoying each other's company. I suppose I am a joy to be around when my whole body is not in pain. Honestly, it was the first time I had not felt the chronic pain from migraines, or from the injury from four years ago that the Worker's Comp lawyers convinced everyone I was lying about.
Then, the pain came back . . . but not as bad. My wife commented I was no longer a joy to be around.
I needed the rest.
I have rested all week.
I cancelled my Tuesday Morning Breakfast I spend with the Banning-Beaumont-Cherry Valley Tea Party each week. I cancelled a pre-record of the Conservative Voice Radio program, leaving the ladies of the team to go it alone. I cancelled my Tuesday Night Constitution Class I teach in Corona. I cancelled my weekly Wednesday Constitution Association executive board meeting, and I nearly cancelled tonight's event in Banning, where after Malcolm McGough speaks to the Tea Party, I am going to give a presentation about constitutional authorities.
I feel better. Not pain-free. That only happened late Monday and early Tuesday. To be pain-free again I am figuring it would entail loading myself up with meds 24/7, or putting myself through some pretty serious surgeries that would also result in an elimination of a lot of my mobility. . . and even then, the migraines and the nerve pain would remain. Such is the consequences of my banged-up life. The thing is, I am good with it. It is a part of what I am. The constant pain forces me to focus a little extra, and reminds me that nothing in life is easy. We have to fight through the pain and the obstacles to get wherever we are going. The pain reminds me that I am still alive, when I should have died at least three times during my journey to this point in my life. The pain reminds me of who I am, and where I need to go. And, it reminds me that as bad as I may think it is, there are those who hurt worse. There are those who wish they could do what I am doing when it comes to constitutional advocacy, but have been knocked out of the game. I do what I do for them, for my grandchildren, and the future generations who deserve to live with liberty in their lives.
Some people, my Christian friends, say the enemy is trying to stop me. He, the dark one, is trying to make me give up. My response? "Awesome." If the enemy in the spiritual warfare portion of what I am doing is worried enough to notice me, and attack me, that means I am doing something right.
Besides, as the old saying goes . . . what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger.
I am wearing the Armor of God, and I am ready for the next round. Last Monday was simply a minor setback.
My message to the enemy is, "Is that all you got?"
The warrior is ready to fight some more. We'll begin in Banning, tonight, at the 5:00 pm Tea Party Meeting.
-- Political Pistachio Conservative News and Commentary
