Billy awoke dazed and doused in sweat. His beige sofa had a pronounced stain etched across the detachable cushions. This would be impossible to remove now. Had he just awoken from a delirious dream? Suddenly, his body was overcome with violent tremors, and his teeth uncontrollably began chattering. His brain was overwhelmed with a melee of flashbacks. He just remained shaking with his jaw clamping down, analogous to a garbage compacter. Terrifyingly, he couldn’t even pry himself off the sofa bed. None of it would cease. How had a dream produced such a violent upheaval in his nervous system? For a fleeting second, he considered calling an ambulance, but realized he couldn’t even get to his phone. He remained paralyzed in a state of violent tremoring on the couch. Had all the stress from the unforeseen events of the past week, culminated in uncontrolled seizures? How long could you possibly shake uncontrollably?
Maybe Percocet could combat the tremoring? While Percocet was designed for pain-relief, it also had a sedative effect. He was certain he had several pills remaining from the insidious onset of a lumbar disc injury, which he experienced during the summer of 2013.
The first two weeks of his disc injury, Billy was in denial of how detrimentally it compromised his health. He always balked at ‘pill-poppers’, and vowed he would never resort to that behaviour. However, after averaging 3 hours of a sleep per night, due to sporadic electrifying pain peripherializing into his right knee,Billy admitted his pain levels demanded a medical intervention. It’s impossible to focus on work in a fast-paced business world sleep-deprived. Invariably, his clients’ portfolios suffered. His sympathetic nervous system was so taxed, that he had no motivation to argue with them when they insisted on withdrawing their money from JC Stanley. He still recalled one caller bellowing on the phone, ‘I don’t care if you need surgery, I need these funds withdrawn as you’re evidently incompetent.’
Moreover, after two weeks of enduring peripherializing pain into his right posterior knee, he began adopting a pronounced antalgic gait. Fellow customers at his regular Starbucks began referring to him as ‘sir’ as he would haphazardly haul himself through the business, while suppressing an agonizing grimace on his face. One very young man condescendingly declared, ‘how was your fiftieth birthday? I look forward to the day I turn thirty’.
Billy was only thirty-five years old, when he sustained this spinal injury. Later he would learn from his physiotherapist that the disc injury occurred at the L5/S1 junction, which is the most common site in the spine for a disc derangement. The public humiliation at the company café, was the final straw.
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