Yesterday, I became aware of a site called Fark.com. Why? Because someone on that site linked to a blog post I wrote a couple of days ago. After reading up a little on what Fark.com is about, I decided to password protect the post. It’s not that I don’t have a sense of humor and appreciation for snark, but that particular post was kind of personal and I wasn’t wanting to field a bunch of shitty comments from people who are just wanting to make fun of me.

I’m surprised I’d never heard of Fark before. It’s been around since 1997. Invented by Drew Curtis, it’s a site where users post links to weird or funny news. I’m sure a number of my blog posts qualify as weird or funny, but the one they were linking to included my rant about my sister sending me a picture of my dad on his death bed. There is really NOTHING funny or snarkworthy about that, so I decided it was time to make that post password protected. Of course, they might have wanted to poke fun at the beginning of that post, which was about one of my pet peeves– people who include themselves in a another person’s singular experience (ie; men saying “We got pregnant.”). Who knows?

Anyway… today’s post might be somewhat weirder and funnier than that one was, especially for those who enjoy laughing at other people’s agony and humiliation. I woke up this morning in excruciating pain. Our mattress is about ten years old and it needs to be replaced. Consequently, for the past few months, I’ve been waking up with increasingly severe lower back pain. Sometimes, I don’t have pain, or it’s not so bad. It hurts for maybe a half an hour and then fades away without any need for Advil. This morning, it’s been pretty horrible. I’ve been up for over two hours and it’s just now starting to subside, and only after I took ibuprofen, a hot shower, and almost passed out from pain at the kitchen table. I sometimes also have problems with my thighs going numb when I’m lying on my back.

Bear with me, now… I’m about to deliver some of my trademark TMI. I’m sure any woman who has been pregnant can relate to this, but this morning I actually found myself on Amazon.com looking for an implement I can use for butt wiping when my back is acting up. Seriously. This isn’t a problem I suffer every day, but it’s happened enough times that I’ve actually considered getting a tool I can load up with toilet paper that will make reaching my ass easier first thing in the morning. Whatever back issues I have make it almost impossible to reach back there until my back loosens up.

My Amazon search reveals that I’m not alone in having this issue. Besides butt wiping tools, there are lots of “portable bidets” available. I can’t decide which would be better for me. If I get a portable bidet, maybe I can save on toilet paper use. Our ex landlady claims that Americans use too much toilet paper, and that’s why the “water saver” toilet in her house backed up three times when we first moved in. Curiously enough, the other, newer one on the ground floor never backed up, nor did we have to flush it three times to get everything to go down. If we’d had a portable bidet when we lived in that house, maybe we wouldn’t have had issues with that toilet. What eventually stopped the blockages was changing our toilet paper brand (and we switched to another American brand, not a German one), and using a hell of a lot more water in the “water saver” toilet and flushing it at least twice with every dump. She never bothered to ask us what we did to remedy the problem so she could warn her future American tenants, but then, she seems to think she knows all about us.

It’s now 9:30am, and the roaring pain in my back that almost made me vomit this morning is now finally quieting down to a dull mew. I probably better give Arran a proper walk today. That will likely make my back pain less severe tomorrow. As hard as it is, the best thing to do is move… but I swear, this morning, the pain was so raw and I was in such agony that I was seriously afraid I was going to faint. I got all hot and clammy and lost color in my face. It’s been awhile since I last passed out, but I know the signs. A lot of times, it’s happened when I’ve been in acute pain. I don’t have the best pain threshold, and since Bill isn’t here, it would not be good to faint.

As for finding a new mattress… unfortunately, it’s not so easy to do that in Germany, since German beds aren’t sized the way American beds are. We could probably order a mattress from AAFES, but that would mean having to figure out how to get it to the house and set up. We may have to do that, though, because I’m only 47 and I don’t want to go through life feeling like this every morning. It’s humiliating to be so stiff and full of pain that I can’t even wipe myself properly after my morning dumps. I know pregnant women deal with this problem, and so do elderly folks. I don’t fit in either category.

I probably also should take better care of myself… eat less crap, drink less booze, and start doing yoga along with other weight bearing exercises. If I want to bring a puppy into our house after the holidays, I’m going to have to be able to keep up. This may also mean that Bill will be dragging me to the doctor by my hair again. Or maybe not…

Hey… it’s almost 10:00am and I just have the slightest pain now. That’s one good thing about having back pain in the morning. When it does finally fade away, you feel so much better, even if it’s not completely gone. I mean, I still have slightly throbbing pain in my hips, but it’s so much less than what it was that I feel comparatively great. Endorphins help, too.

I think I like the word, “farked”. Maybe I will incorporate it into my daily vocabulary. But I don’t think I will be frequenting that Web site, fun as it probably is.