This is an excerpt from my memoir, Officer Banfield — the honest story of my years as a corrections and police officer, hitting bottom in alcoholism, and the long road to recovery.
You may be wondering about the Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, "All right, how did that go?"
Naturally, it was a men's meeting, and at the end the guy threw in this little comic.
He said something like, "Well, that's definitely not causing my back problems," and everyone laughed. I laughed at the irony, because the same basic thing was applying to him. His back was hurting because of what he was doing to his own back at work.
He was causing his own problem, just as I set myself up to get hurt at this job. I pulled my back and all of a sudden as soon as I stood up, as soon as we got her in position and got her arrested, I felt the back muscle pulling and it started tensing up. I did the exact wrong things at the time to make this easier.
I pulled a calf muscle a couple of months ago. I treated it very well and within a couple of days, it felt better and within a week or so, it was back to normal with no pain medications and no trip to the doctor needed.
What I did not do was continue straining my back and stretching it afterward. Instead, what I did when I injured my back at DMH, first, I didn't say anything. We arrested this lady, I knew my back was hurt immediately, but I thought maybe it would go away.
I had had a lot of back pain in my life, so I figured that maybe this was just a little thing and that it would go away. We took her down to the jail, which meant a 30-minute car ride in the police car sitting down with my back in somewhat of a stretched position versus standing up.
Standing up is one of the best places for your back and since I've been standing up playing video games and spending so much time standing up, I've had almost no back pain for the last several years.
Standing up and walking are some of the very best things you can do for your back along with just laying down and sleeping. If your entire day consists of sitting, that is not good for your back.
In this case, spending 30 more minutes sitting in the patrol car, my back pull continued to get worse and worse.
Then, when we got to the jail, we spent two hours there during which time my back was hurting, so I did the exact wrong thing, I continued trying to stretch it. My back had gotten stretched and strained, and I continued trying to stretch it. I kept bending over thinking that if I stretched my back it would make it better, but it did not.
By the time we had spent two hours at the jail trying to get this lady admitted, my back was knotted up really bad, it was getting difficult to walk and I started to get scared.
I finally talked about my back injury to the female investigator.
I said, "Something's wrong. I think I've hurt my back and I'm having a hard time walking now."
Because as you can imagine, after several hours of not taking care of it, acting like it wasn't a big deal, stretching it, my back was pissed and the muscle had continued to tighten and tighten, and now it had gotten tight as a knot and it was hurt and hurting good.
After that, then we finally got out of the jail. The jail did not want to take her because she was a mental health patient and it turned out the jail ended up returning her to the exact same facility.
They managed to have the judge say that she was already in Mental Health, she didn't need to go to jail. I guess she had a case pending or whatever. They sent her right back to the facility.
Long story short, this whole ordeal was basically for nothing. We spent all this time arresting her, taking her to the jail, having my back hurt, all of this for nothing.
Now, in the grand scheme of things in God's plan, nothing is for nothing.
Therefore, this had an integral part to play in the big picture. However, at
the time, I was really pissed when I found out that she went right back to the facility.
I said, "Really. I hurt my back for nothing?"
However, as you will see, there were consequences in my personal life as we have talked about some already for this little back pull.
After the arrest and finally getting out of the jail, I then reported that I had been injured at work in which case you needed to fill out all this paperwork for being injured at work.
You got to work on getting workers' compensation, fill out all of that.
Fortunately, all the hospital treatment, everything was fully covered. Even though it technically was a work injury, I really had put myself in the position for it with my lifestyle.
I went then to the emergency room and thankfully there was nobody there so I got right in, although it still managed to take at least an hour for them to basically do nothing and send me home with some pills, which is exactly what happened.
What they did do and what I was looking for was a form to get out of work, and they gave me off of work for an indeterminate period.
So, all I needed to do was to go back to the doctor in two weeks and I could have stayed out of work significantly longer. They gave me two weeks where I could just stay home and take my pills and when you are not used to taking pills, these were pretty powerful.
Then, I would come back in a couple of weeks and go to the doctor. So I would go home from that, and then I naturally threw down the meds in the exact doses they gave me. I played some "Rise of Nations." I called my parents up to tell them what happened. My mom thought I was drunk
because I was slurring my speech.
I said, "No, Mom. This is just whatever the medication they gave me."
That was about a couple of weeks of agony. I had not ever hurt my back that bad before and as soon as the meds wore off, I woke up and literally every time I rolled over, it sent a throbbing pain, acute at first, and then a little dull after that through my whole back.
Just rolling over was quite painful, and every time I rolled over in my sleep, it woke me up. It was miserable and I felt so sorry for myself, "This isn't fair. Why did this happen to me? I don't deserve this."
When you think about it, I chose to be a police officer. I neglected to learn much about self-care. I did things I knew were damaging to my body without taking proper care of it, and then I obviously put myself in a good position to hurt my back.
Still, I felt really sorry for myself that it wasn't fair and it shouldn't have happened to me. But I did enjoy that it gave me a lot of time to stay at home, play video games and try to date online, and talk to my parents.
However, that only was good while the medications were brand new, and this is when the girl came over one day. I was on those muscle relaxers and pretty relaxed, and I was careless about pulling out.
While the medications were new, I was able to pretty much just relax and take it easy most of the day. For someone who was staying sober and used to a restless irritable and discontent life, this was actually pretty relaxing to just stay at home, take some muscle relaxers, take the Motrin and whatever other little pain pills they gave me.
After a week of taking the muscle relaxers and the Motrin, and I don't
know if they gave me like an Advil or something else, we are not talking strong stuff, after a week I got used to it where taking the pills was about the same as not taking them.
The human body is remarkably fast at adapting to new circumstances and that's exactly what my body did. It got used to the pills very quickly and after a week I got a back that was pretty sore and it didn't matter whether I was taking the meds or not. The back hurt like hell and my mind was not relaxed either. My mind was going crazy and I was sitting at home.
When I was staying sober, I was depending heavily on work to keep me busy and to give me something to do.
After a few months sober, I was starting to get bad shit crazy playing video games all day, hanging out with my friends, not having shit to do all day and not feeling very good either. I was starting to think about a drink a whole lot.
Then, my best friend said, "I got a poker game I'm going to Saturday night."
I said, "Man, I really, really want to go to that poker game."
But I knew if I was to go to the poker game I was going to drink, and therefore, I was trying so hard to stay sober.
I said, "No, man. I'm not going to be able to go to that poker game."
Actually, I didn't tell him right away. What I did, I went back to the doctor after two weeks and lied to the doctor. My back was still hurting a good bit, not nearly as much as right after it happened, but I was not ready to go back to work.
I should not have gone back to work, but I lied to the doctor.
I said, "I feel great. Everything's all good. Back's healed up."
The doctor said, "Great. We don't need to give you any more meds.
You're ready to go back to work."
The doctor was surprised that my back had healed up so quick because I was lying. I really wanted to get back to work and I went into the doctor's appointment with the intention to say whatever I needed to get the doctor to clear me for work.
At this point, I was cleared indefinitely not to go back to work and the doctor had to clear me to go back to work.
So, as long as I kept saying I had back pain and my back hurt, I could have stayed out of work potentially for months longer than that.
I just bullshitted and said my back didn't hurt anymore, but if I had done the opposite and kept saying my back did hurt, maybe at some point the doctor would have called bullshit or made me do some more tests.
At this point, I could have stayed out a lot longer, but I wanted to go back to work. So, even though my back still hurt a good bit, I said, "Look, everything's good. My back's all healed up. I'm fine. Just clear me for work."
The doctor cleared me for work, and then I told my friend, "Look, I can't go to that poker game because I got to work that night."
He said, "That's great. Your back healed a lot faster. You can get back to work."
So, I went back to work even though my back was still stiff as hell. I stopped taking the meds after a week because they weren't working anymore. They just left me feeling a little tired, which was annoying. I
noticed that when I took those meds it seemed like while at first the muscle relaxers were helping, my body was reacting by tensing up extra afterward.
Looking back on it, it seems the meds actually significantly slowed down my recovery. I think today if I just had not taken the meds and taken better care of it right after it happened, it legitimately could have been completely better within two weeks or less, and I wouldn't have needed any meds.
I actually hurt my back playing racquetball, not nearly as bad, but I aggravated it playing racquetball in graduate school. I started taking those meds again, the same ones, I had simply saved them up and kept them from before.
I started taking those meds again and I noticed that it seemed like my back was not getting any better, that when I took the muscle relaxers, my back would relax, but then, it was like it would be worse or just as bad whenever it tensed up. It was like whatever the muscle relaxers were doing was screwing up my body's natural healing process and slowing things down.
Therefore, I look around today at a country and a world full of people taking prescriptions and wondering why shit doesn't get better.
For me, stopping that stuff is what helped.
That's my personal experience, that for me taking any kind of pain pill or muscle relaxer seems to slow down my recovery.
When you are taking those things, you don't have a good sense of what you should and shouldn't do to injure yourself, even if it is just a little bit more. If you are on a muscle relaxer, you feel more comfortable extending yourself further than you should.
I know people who are on a lot of pain pills and other medications. What I've noticed is they end up feeling better, and then push themselves so far that they end up with basically a day in bed.
If you can't feel what's going on, you don't have a sense of limitation of what you can and can't do and this is what happened for that week I was taking those pain pills. I felt better than I should have while I was on them, and then I kept slowing down my recovery on them.
Once I stopped taking them, my back started to heal up pretty good after that. It hurt more at first, but I also had a good sense of what I should and should not do because I could feel exactly how it felt.
Therefore, I think in two weeks, it easily could have healed up totally. But with taking those medications, overextending myself a bit and not even realizing it, and then having just a week without taking any of the medications, I was back to work and still hurting a bit.
If you connect with how I live and think, you can follow the rest of my days on YouTube in my Life playlist.