NoD #129 — Brokeback Blogger

I may well be running late with my self-determined newslettering schedule again, but I gotta say the reason here is pretty solid, too. One could even call it ruinous.

Fear and helplessness in Lumbago land

Earlier this week I was doing some house-cleaning, which involved moving around large bags of boardgames. (Yes, that’s not even an uncommon thing for boardgaming hobbyists. Those things stack up, and spacious bags are handy for moving them to and fro.) I wouldn’t characterize the bags as particularly heavy, but regardless: I bent forward to pick one up and then had the peculiar experience of my spine giving way. It was like a small shift in my spine, like some small piece, say a “disc”, had “slipped” out of position.

I’ve experienced your garden variety back pains, of course I have; I imagine everybody over 25 years old must have. This was completely different, a sharply searing pain that forces one to jerk away from the source, in this case a particular position of the spine. It felt impossible and ruinous to push through, the sort of pain you ignore at your own peril. At the same time it wasn’t entirely and instantly debilitating, apparently, because I kinda hobbled around enough to take the boardgames to storage. That took just half a minute, and when I was coming back and noticing that the back pain wasn’t going away, I realized that this was clearly serious: the most minute shift in the position of the lower spine would send searing pain signals. Lying down was both nigh-impossible and didn’t really help much.

I’m not a doctor, but I am a little bit of a folklorist, so I could instantly tell that what had struck me was the common folk ailment known in Finnish as “noidannuoli”, the ‘witch’s arrow’. Actual medical diagnosis would have to wait for a bit of an Internet detour, but for those inclined to supernatural explanations, this would be the traditional one: a secret enemy of mine shot me with a Magic Missile from hiding, causing a sudden and debilitating back pain. (This’ll be what the Magic Missile will look like the next time I play a Wizard in D&D: it’s invisible and a hit just plain causes your lumbar region to explode.)

My brother has some personal experience with what we ended up diagnosing as essentially the same kind of back pain, and, well, if you have familiarity with this sort of thing you can probably guess that what I experienced here is very likely a form of spinal disc herniation, a statistically very common form of lumbago (lower spine) dysfunction. I have a fair bit of confidence in the diagnosis here, so while the experience has been scary and frustrating, there’s little reason to go bother a doctor about it. We’re not exactly at a point of civilization where society can afford hand-holding random lumbago patients.

Managing fear and helplessness

I have the privilege of being a self-assured philosopher type, memento mori, blah blah, so it’s not like I fell apart instantly at the experience of breaking my back. But as I tried to capture above, whether you can handle the stress or not, the experience qua itself is surely remarkably fearsome. Masculine warrior patterns of self-control and crisis control and well, control in general, are particularly awkward for processing the helplessness of being a cripple, too; there is nothing to fight, no problem to solve, no triage to be done. Immediate panic and despair can be set aside, but when the crisis continues for hours and days, ignoring the grief does nothing for you; it must be processed.

The herniation (I’m just going to keep assuming that this is spinal disc herniation, as per my self-diagnosis) has essentially crippled me as a functioning physical being for most purposes outside desk work; at least it doesn’t affect my ability to sit (in a carefully calibrated fashion) and write. The slow and deliberate fashion in which I have to stand and walk, and the basic inability to lift or carry, make most other things impossible. As the pain comes in sudden spikes during movement, it’s difficult to ignore entirely, and you definitely shouldn’t give me a baby or other fragile things to hold right now.

The basic treatment for the injury is rest, light exercise and patience. The good news is that this is indeed a very common type of affliction, for all that I hadn’t personally experienced it before, and it’s generally considered likely to more or less heal on its own. Might take several weeks, but apparently I shouldn’t start looking for a wheelchair quite yet. Of course hearing others say that is thin gruel next to the subjective experience of entirely novel realms of pain.

As a general note on managing the stress of the experience, I find that what works best for me is proactively understanding and exploring the situation. Practically speaking, after the initial diagnosis, I’ve spent a couple of days collecting subjective sensory data on how my body has suddenly changed. This has brought me some confidence on the herniation diagnosis, which in turn allows me to understand the physiological nature of spinal disc herniation.

Why my back hurts

The root of fear/helplessness is in the unknown. As any practicing philosopher can surely tell you, anything that can be comprehended by the mind can be acknowledged and quantified. It is only the unknown that we fear.

Consequently I found an amusing self-interest in reading a bit about the exact nature of spinal disc herniation as a physiological phenomenon. Makes the pain more understandable, and while I do not consciously direct my body to heal, knowing the theory of recovery is certainly better than operating on the assumption that I will never run (or even really walk) again.

The gist of this herniation affair is, if I’m allowed a dumb summary, that the soft and bendy connecting tissue between vertebrae (the bony parts of the spine), which is often called the “disc”, can tear and rupture from the pressures involved in using the spine to carry boardgames. The disc consists internally of a sort of shock-absorption gel, wrapped in the kind of tough membrane that you’re no doubt familiar with in biological constructs. There are several of these discs in the lower spine and neck, the particularly bendy parts of the human spine.

Apparently the herniation is inherently not superbly dangerous, as the disc can heal from the injury, as one does. The painful symptoms are caused by local pain nerves not liking pressure on the distressed flesh, and secondarily and more famously/seriously by the herniated lump of flesh pressing into the spinal canal and pinching various nerves there. The actually serious herniation symptoms, the kind that require medical attention, are caused by such nerve pinching. Sciatic nerve would famously radiate pain to the legs, for example, and the prospect of losing anal control due to such nerve issues does sound awkward.

However, as best as I can discern from subjective pain experience, what I have here is a very let’s say garden variety herniation: while the pain was surprising and scary at first due to lack of experience with this type of injury, it is very clearly completely localized to the spine itself. I guess I’m literally in pain because the disc itself is inflamed and thus it hurts when I put any pressure on it, rather than due to my spine being in the process of crumbling into dust, leaving the spinal cord open to the wind. I’ve yet to manage to get any “interesting” radiating nerve effects out of this.

A clear case of knowledge alleviating fear and concern here. I’m basically just getting horrible back pains because of the equivalent of a badly stubbed toe that just happens to be in a part of the body where it’s difficult to avoid putting pressure on it. Not because I’m e.g. in the process of sawing off the sciatic nerve or something like that. (Apparently if the latter was occurring, I’d notice it for lack of mobility in the leg itself.)

Coup de Main in Greyhawk

But that’s it for my personal problems, let’s look at the gaming schedule. The game’s open to visitors, newcomers, inexperienced players, cats and dogs.

Coup de Main #88

More Coup de Gnarley from last summer, with Tuomas:

Fair enough. This Narwellian wizard fellow is the one who lifted a few curses from the party in trade for the periapt from the griffon mountain. Apparently he’s been happy with the relationship, as quests keep dropping.

I’m seeing a pattern in the way the Knights Temp have been adventuring recently: Rob the Thief kicks down various traps, and then the party goes home with the spoils. It’s a good pattern, largely made to work by Rob being both careful and turgid with levels. The funny part is that Rob insists that he’s not a member of the Knights, he’s just there temporarily while Bob the Commoner, Heikki’s actual Knights Temp character, heals from his chaos hydra bite.

Coup in Sunndi #62

As I’ve remarked before, I’m writing these reports from a bit of a remote, about six months since we actually played this stuff. I guess my memory of what we did in this session is a bit hazy, but whatever; not like I feel like writing a huge amount tonight anyway.

So as I discussed regarding last session, we were sort of switching adventures weekly here, taking turns between the “Doom of Naerie” affair and the “Bountyhunters of Dhalmond”, depending mostly on whether Antti was with us to progress the Naerie thing, which was generally considered the more concrete and pressing adventure between the two. Last week was bountyhunting, and this time it was back to Naerie, where last time the party had discovered the fables Wax Cauldron and then promptly sunk it into the harbor.

With that good deed done, we got back into what to me feels like a very interesting mode of adventuring, namely high-level maneuvering. The adventurers knew that divine signs were pointing at a city-threatening Doom coming down from the Hollow Hills within a month or so. But what should be done about that, exactly?

The session was largely spent in planning and managing the local political context, preparing the city of Naerie for the coming catastrophe. This sort of stuff:

• The paladins of Rao arranged for Raoan faithful to spread word of the evil omens to the countryside, so as to evacuate populations into the city in expectation of imminent assault by undead hordes.
• While attempting to coordinate with the city guard, Ben the junior paladin got hilariously suspected of being involved in an unrelated heist adventure (something about a royal ruby having been stolen, probably nothing to do with the Doom), which ultimately didn’t go anywhere.
• The oracles at the temple of Wee-Jas finished their elaborate rituals and infodumbed the party and involved NPC allies about the nature of the Duvan’Ku threat lurking in the hills. Lots of magical theory about atheist annihilationism, inner planes necromancy and whatnot.
• The Hollow Hills barbarian clan of the Hakadaro sent some messengers to Naerie to declare their great victory against the undead, which then obviously set the planning for further steps of Doom-management into high gear.

So a grab-bag of this and that, but what was in reality the centerpiece of the session was the players making strategic plans for how to manage the undead threat they were expecting. Their focus was very diplomacy-oriented, which meant that we spent time discussing the details of how the kingdom of Idee, the city of Naerie (the capital), and the Hollow Hills barbarian clans worked together as economic and military factions. Great stuff, I like this kind of intelligent, intricate fantasy wargaming.

The players ultimately settled on a sort of Grand Alliance plan; they’d learned all kinds of stuff about the barbarian culture of the Hollow Hills over the preceding sessions of various adventuring in the area, and among the dross there was the significant notion that while the clans were otherwise independent-minded and difficult to treat with, they were unified by the “Temple of the Bee Queen”, a hallowed institution that all the clans paid respect to. So if the paladins wanted to get the otherwise fairly hostile forces of Naerie and the barbarians to play ball and oppose the Doom together, one possible approach to doing that would be to travel to meet the Bee Queen cult and see if they might be convinced to back the operation.

The other immediate concern that might benefit from direct attentions would be to travel to the Hakadaro clan lands and see the nature of the undead threat directly. The Hakadaros, having been assaulted by the undead most fiercely, would presumably be friendly to the cause with trivial amounts of diplomatic wrangling, and the players were of course well aware of how close they live to the cursed mountain itself.

With these sorts of strategic-level concerns on the line, the adventurers ended up leaving instructions for Naerie to prepare its strength, while leaving to the hills themselves to rouse the barbarian clans to help. The PCs even missed having an actual royal audience, amusingly. Understandable, as it was taking time for Naerie to come to realize how pressing the situation was (all this talk of Doom was, after all, merely religious doom-saying at this point), and every day the adventurers wasted was one more day of delay in starting the process of Unifying the Clans.

A side point about the politics here: whenever I discussed the political structure of the Hollow Hills barbarian nation, I made a point of how the clans generally speaking never convened for a royal moot to appoint a King unless they were planning to march to war against the civilized peoples living in the surrounding lands. This generation’s target du jour for the barbarian raiders, quite openly expressed all along, has been Naerie itself; lots of barbarians in the hills who are waiting and hoping for the day when the clans manage to set aside their differences and march to burn that nest of villains to the ground. So kinda fun to see the consequences if the players manage to Unify the Clans against the threats of Evil and whatnot.

Anyway, we’d spent most of the session in planning work. The actual expedition to the Hills (planned to hit the Hakadaro clan lands first, and then off to the Bee Queen Temple, I think) was distracted by a minor stirge encounter that the players handily managed by finding impromptu shelter from the blood-sucking birds. Just a bit of conventional adventure chaff to end the session on.

State of the Productive Facilities

I’m pretty brokeback right now, which isn’t the best for working motivation, but at least I can sit and write, so I’m not quite ready for the glue plant yet. I fortunately got all the time-sensitive stuff cleared off my desk before herniating, and there’s no pressing yardwork or anything like that demanding by back muscles, so I guess I’m just chilling for the holidays here, waiting to regain mobility.