My back has been acting up on me a bit for the past week or two, which usually means that I sometimes have a hard time getting up. Well, that and moving, walking, bending over, putting on my shoes, and living.

But otherwise, things are really great!

I sometimes have little ‘episodes' after I do things, but other times it can happen when I've done nothing at all. This recent incident was one of those.

I really don't know what happened, but whatever it was, it happened.

Sometimes you just start to do something and there it is, back pain. For instance, I once hurt my back stepping out of the truck. Other times I've moved truckloads of large heavy rocks, built large structures and done extreme things with nary a sign of problems.

Unpredictability seems to be the only thing about this that is predictable. It had been many months since my last trouble, which actually didn't involve my lower back at all. I woke up one morning with my neck in a jam and found it difficult to sit upright and look forward, let alone even consider turning my head. I ended up at a chiropractic office, where I went for several sessions before eventually finding relief.

This past spring, my health insurance co-pay on such care went up to $50 per visit for specialists, including chiropractors, pretty much pricing me out of anything other than emergency care. (Before, I had to pay around $20 to $30 per visit, as I recall).

It's probably much better to get a little bit of that stuff on a regular basis rather than a whole lot every once in a while. However, there is another thing I can usually depend on if I have back problems. If I wait and don't do anything silly, it will go away. Sometimes it goes quickly and sometimes it doesn't. Even so, I try not to change the way I live my life just because my back might act up. I still do everything I need to do with reckless abandon, letting the consequences take care of themselves later.

It's much better to do things that way than to do nothing for fear of what might or might not happen. That really would be no life at all.

This most recent occasion was most interesting in that I had to be careful when trying to stand up lest I get ‘stuck' in the no man's land halfway between up and down. This halfway position was the moment before one would typically rise from the seat and would freeze me there in terrible pain.

I've learned that there's a catch point when I lean forward to stand that I had to be careful not to get into. What I ended up doing was trying to get up more quickly. It was effective part of the time. The rest of the time, I would just have to wait until the pain subsided and try again.

One night about two weeks ago I was sitting in the chair when I realized that I couldn't get up. Locked in pain, I couldn't move forward and I couldn't go back. I ended up pitching over into the floor and laying there for a minute until I could carefully pull myself up using the couch.

A fellow came by to drop something off and I told him to come in, but couldn't get up to greet him. I didn't really tell him what was going on, so I hope he didn't think I was being rude. He had to leave quickly, so there was no time to explain things. Just as mysteriously as the pain came, it pretty much left. Oh, there were still hints that my back was unhappy when I moved a certain way, but whatever had happened ‘unhappened.'

In fact, last week I even went out to split more wood with nary a sign of problems, other than my typical signs of strenuous labor. Those may or may not include sweating, panting for breath, feelings of fatigue and muscle soreness. "It's all part of growing older," a friend told me.

That sure did make me feel better about the whole thing. So, in other words, this will get worse? How comforting.