Brett Taylor Activated from the Injured List

“I’m back.”

-30-

This is almost all personal stuff, so if you’re entirely uninterested in my life, you can stop here. I’ll see you in the baseball content. Man it’s gonna feel so good to be fully back in that world ….

OK, so, where have I been? What happened? Why has it been a month since I was full go around here?

For those who don’t know, I recently hurt my back pretty badly. Thanks to years of back injuries that I never properly rested, one of my discs finally gave out five weeks ago. I was at the gym, doing a weighted squat, probably with crap form, and that’s when it happened. The pop I felt in my back was NOT subtle, nor was the pain that immediately followed. Not only did my back lock up, but I had terrible pain down my back, down my left leg, into my side and oblique, and even pain that radiated around to the front and down into my groin.

When some of the pain reduced the next day, I realized that the groin portion had gone completely numb. That’s pretty scary – when numbness starts to creep close to certain areas, you FREAK OUT – and it sent me to the ER. A series of scans later, and it was clear I’d badly herniated the disc at L1-L2 in my back, and it was compressing a nerve root just past the bottom of my spinal cord. Because the herniation was so sizable, because it was relatively high up in my back, and because of the alarming numbness, I was advised to have surgery as soon as possible.

My head was spinning. I had been going to the gym every single day. Hitting it hard. I was, to borrow the phrase, in the Best Shape of My Life. I wouldn’t say I thought I was invincible, but I certainly wasn’t contemplating the very real possibility that it can all go away in a blink. Until it did.

The entire turnaround was barely a week, from injury to surgery to completely laid up. I still can’t believe how much changed in such a short time.

Thankfully, the surgery went well – I am a chunk of disc and a piece of vertebrae lighter – and I have recovered reasonably well.

That said, I dramatically overestimated my ability to get back to normal life quickly. I figured I’d be down for a few days, maybe a week, and then I’d be into “ramp back up” mode. I was naive or arrogant or both, and it took me some time to come to terms with just how long the process of recovery was going to be. I’m probably still not all there mentally yet, but I’m closer.

That’s why I’ve been so limited this past month. Doing almost anything post-surgery was surprisingly difficult, not just physically but mentally. My focus was just not there, and I would get tired. So tired. I was literally falling asleep at 7:30, 8pm. And I’d just randomly have to rest for multiple hours throughout the day, turning my body and brain off and just kinda laying there. It sucked. I don’t recommend.

I’m a whole lot better now, though. This week especially, I’ve started to feel so much more like myself. I am grateful.

So, from here I’ll be doing the physical therapy to try to get some core strength back in a safe way, and continue the process of building back up to something approximating where I was before all this happened. I’ll let you know how that goes.

Bigger picture, I will have to be thoughtful and careful for the rest of my life, because a second issue in the same spot would lead to even more serious surgical interventions. And even if that doesn’t happen, I was #Blessed with a second herniated disc at the more common L5-S1 (a less significant herniation, thankfully) AND a good old fashioned regular groin hernia that may require its own procedure in the near future! Those scans revealed a lot of other random minor stuff, too. Apparently I really beat the shit out of my body in the process of taking good care of my body.

The key here is that I didn’t “listen” when my body told me to slow down and take a break. In baseball parlance, I’m the guy who kept going out there with a nagging injury, when everyone else could see I should be sitting. I played poorly because of it and hurt the team in the process. And I made the injury even worse, turning a minor issue into a significant absence.

The thing that kills me is that the main reason I started hitting the gym so hard over the last five years is because our youngest, who has a genetic condition and developmental disability, is going to be with us forever. I knew I needed to maintain a certain level of fitness and strength to be able to care for her deep into the graying phase of my life. And it’s precisely because of that zeal that I pushed myself too hard, did too much damage, and wound up at risk for some serious long-term debilitation for which I might not have otherwise been at risk.

There’s a lesson in there and I really hope I’ve learned it. There’s too much at stake for me not to. And I hope by sharing the story, maybe I can plant a seed for some of you: working out is a wonderful thing for your physical and mental health, but take it seriously when your body tells you that you’re pushing too hard. I really, really hope I can be better about striking the right balance going forward.

Now for the BN stuff.

You’ve possibly noticed that I have been doing some writing over the past few weeks – how could I not? But you maybe also noticed that it was shorter, one-off, carefully-managed stuff. It was what I was able to do at the time.

Michael has handled the editorial voice of the Cubs’ coverage for the last month – the Bullets, the game coverage, the bigger picture commentary pieces – and I have been so impressed. And relieved. We all tend to think the world can’t possibly go on without us, and I’m sure I had a bit too much of that in my head about this place. For over a decade, I never didn’t do that job. Maybe for a single day here or there? So it was very weird and hard to suddenly go a month without it. But Michael made it possible, and he did so well that I stopped worrying after the first couple days and just focused on recovering.

I’m still not 100%, I suppose, but I am definitely ready to get back to a more normal life, which, for me, includes getting back to something more normal around here. I want to do the Bullets again. I want to cover games. I want to be thinking deeply – too deeply! – about the Cubs.

So, I’m back. Hopefully for another uninterrupted stretch of 10+ years, though I’ll try to take better care of myself in the process.