Dear Family,
Sophie alleges in her most recent letter that our family is “not all that interesting.” She writes:
“We do the [Sunday] crossword together every week, we send our daily Wordle attempts (and little else) into the family group chat, and we occasionally like to muse on the exciting potential of last names better or worse than our own. That’s all we’ve got.”
Sophie Willis, 9 Feb 2024
It’s hard to take issue with Sophie’s assertion that we lead fairly uneventful lives (though I would argue that uneventfulness is underrated). But I can’t say I agree with her assessment of our family group chat. I mean, sure, there may be stretches where it might appear that all we do is report on the Wordle…
But if you zoom out, you’ll see that we cover a broad range of topics.
Sometimes we get into the daily Spelling Bee puzzle:
Less often, the “Connections” puzzle — though only when someone does something extraordinary, like identify the four connections in reverse order (from hardest to easiest) — very rare, always worthy of sharing.
The family chat is named “Willis Kids” even though Crystal and I are on it. I am given to understand that the actual Willis kids maintain their own separate chat. I obviously have no way of knowing what gets discussed there — favorite scriptures and odes to virtue and righteousness, I imagine.
But were it not for the “Willis Kids” chat, I might not have learned that Hannah and Emma went to Cancun two weekends ago for a friend’s wedding. It sounds like they had a nice time relaxing on the beach (because uneventfulness is underrated)…
…and riding dolphins (because you can’t really enjoy uneventfulness unless you have some eventfulness for contrast).
And, p.s., Grace just introduced me to the French version of the Wordle. It goes by the rather unimaginative name Le Mot (“the word”). It was a pretty easy one today. Grace and I both got it in three guesses.
“Ridiculopathy”
I probably should have opened the letter with this, but, you know, the Wordle.
On any given day for the past 15 years, if you were to have asked Crystal how she was feeling, despite her telling you that she was fine, she likely was experiencing pain in her lower back and right hip.
She has sought treatment for this on and off over the years with occasional trips to chiropractors, physical therapists, and I don’t remember what else. Not one to dwell on the chronic annoyances of her life (a quality that has no doubt contributed to her remaining married to me for 29 years and 9 months) it is a topic that she has allowed to fade into the background of our collective life — something I guess she’s just resigned herself to living with.
The two of us hypothesize that her condition has something to do with having spent something like ten consecutive years balancing one child after another on her right hip. In hindsight, I’m not sure why she always opted for the right hip. She’s right-handed, and so it seems to me that using her left hip would have freed up her dominant hand and arm for maternal multitasking, but who am I to tell her she was doing it wrong?
So imagine my concern (and confusion) when Crystal told me three weeks ago that her left hip was starting to bother her.
It began on Sunday, February 4th, when Crystal spent a little while thinking that she was feeling more achy than usual. Being the first Sunday of the month (fast Sunday), she initially attributed it to the fact that she often feels a little off-kilter on days when she abstains from caloric intake. But these various mild discomforts generally subside when fast Sunday ends and eating resumes.
Nourishment didn’t help this time and far more pain than Crystal was accustomed to began taking over her entire lower left side, centering around her lower back and left hip and radiating down her left leg. She describes the sensation in her leg, strangely, as sometimes numb, sometimes painful, sometimes pockets of both. Consequently, she can’t rely on her left leg to do things she expects it to do. Her left foot often flaps when she walks, the result of her apparently lacking the strength to lift the front part of it off the ground.
Her pain quickly progressed to the point where no position felt comfortable — sitting, standing, lying down — all painful. She can ride the Peloton, swim (briefly), and sit in the bathtub without pain, but pretty much everything else hurts.
That’s the worst part of it, I think — that there seems to be no escaping the discomfort. Lying down doesn’t help and sometimes makes it worse. Which makes sleep problematic. I can only imagine how frustrating that must be. Even after my worst injuries (amazingly, it’s been nearly two whole years since a car last hit me on my bike — I’m going for the record this time!) I’ve been able to get comfortable lying down.
I feel fortunate to have reached my 52nd birthday without having experienced any kind of meaningful back pain (knock, knock). As I age, I am finding it increasingly difficult to sit at a piano/organ bench for more than 90 minutes without some lower back soreness. But it’s nothing major and all I have to do to make it go away is stand up (or find a chair with a back, or lie down, or just do literally anything other than sit on a hard, backless bench). I’m trying to think of how it would feel to be consigned to a piano bench for hours on end without ever being permitted to stand up. It sounds dreadful, and I’m pretty sure what Crystal has is way worse.
She visited the chiropractor on Wednesday, February 7th. Like most visits to the chiropractor, this brought just enough temporary relief to secure a return appointment to the chiropractor (on Friday, the 9th). I’ve never been to a chiropractor, possibly because I’ve never had a back problem (knock, knock), and I don’t know enough about chiropractic care to pass any kind of informed judgment about it. But this much is clear to me: chiropractic visits are extraordinarily effective at persuading people to return for additional chiropractic visits.
They may very well be effective at other things that I have not been witness to. To the extent that chiropractic care doesn’t work, I don’t blame chiropractors so much as I blame the human spinal column — that maddeningly enigmatic part of our anatomy that my brother-in-law Roland (an orthopedic spine surgeon) once characterized to me simply as “an annuity.”
Ka-ching!
Crystal called her brother and described her symptoms. Roland said he’d need to see an MRI to say for sure, but it sounded like she was suffering from something called “ridiculopathy.”
Spelled correctly, the word he actually said was radiculopathy, but it sounds like it should be “ridiculopathy.” In reality, it sounds made-up — rather like a spell one might learn at Hogwarts.
Ridiculopathy!
Say that with just the right intonation while flicking the wand you picked up for $49.95 at the Wizarding World of Harry Potter, and something’s bound to happen. (Unless they inexplicably followed their owners off to college, we probably have a half-dozen such wands scattered around this house somewhere. Maybe I’ll try it sometime.)
Roland guessed that Crystal’s radiculopathy — pain caused by pressure on nerves where they emerge from the spinal cord through the vertebrae — was coming from L5 and told Crystal to see her local orthopedist. (Roland lives in North Idaho, roughly 10 million miles from here.)
The ortho dutifully performed an x-ray on Wednesday, February 14th. The x-ray enabled him to confirm that Crystal’s hips “look good” (something I already knew) but did not reveal the source of her pain. He scheduled an MRI for Wednesday the 21st and prescribed some pain meds that have proven largely ineffective.
Crystal called the doctor to ask if he would be willing to prescribe drugs that actually work. But the doctor was unwilling to do that until he saw the results of the MRI.
Thanks, drug addicts.
The MRI people presumably sent the results to Crystal’s local orthopedist. As I write this (late Sunday night) I don’t know whether he has reviewed them — he apparently only comes into the office on Mondays and Wednesdays. My immediate reaction was to be annoyed at that level of absenteeism, until I remembered that it exactly matched my typical weekly in-office schedule. The MRI people also gave Crystal a copy of the MRI results on a CD.
I think it was a CD. It may have been a DVD. But it doesn’t really matter because I honestly can’t remember the last time I even saw a computer capable of interacting with such an obsolete medium. It may as well have been a wax cylinder.
Were these people unfamiliar with thumb drives? Now there’s a fine 20+ year old bit of tech for you, but at least it’s from this century. It shouldn’t surprise me though. I’m pretty sure the last place that told me I needed to fax something was a doctor’s office.
Unwilling to wait for her doctor to mosey back into the office and look at her MRI, Crystal went about trying to figure out how to get the contents of her CD/DVD/Wax Cylinder out to Roland in Idaho.
She accomplished this by somehow locating in the middle school where she works a sufficiently ancient computer to extract the MRI data and share it with Roland over Google Meet. Roland quickly diagnosed, in Crystal’s words, “a large herniated disc” between L-4 and L-5.
Which means he guessed right. That sounds impressive (and it is impressive) even though, based on my extensive review of the literature (i.e., a 30-second Google search), I have since learned that L-4/L-5 is where most disc failures occur.
Presumably as a result of my “literature review,” my YouTube feed — which used to serve me up a steady, soothing, predictable diet of content from Global Cycling Network, Global Triathlon Network, CityNerd, Not Just Bikes, Geography King, Jim Gaffigan, Nate Bargatze, John Oliver, Bill Maher, and about 50 different running channels — is now burying me in back rehab videos. I fear my life will never be the same again.
I’ve made the mistake of watching some of these videos (which, of course, just prompts the algorithm to serve me up even more of them). There appears to be a consensus among the makers of YouTube videos about herniated discs that herniated discs don’t usually require surgery. I have no way of knowing whether Crystal’s “large” one falls into the category of those that do. I guess we’ll have to wait for the doctor to come back from his weekly 4-day weekend to find out.
Crystal’s been to physical therapy a couple of times this month. The first time made her cry. The second time made her feel better. It seemed to help, but not unlike her visits to the chiropractor, the relief is transitory.
So stay tuned.
Musical Exploits
Local friends and family have three — count ‘em, THREE — opportunities to hear Grace and me perform in March.
First, me (because my concerts are first). The Washington D.C. Temple Choir’s Easter concerts are on Saturday, March 16th, at 7:00 p.m. at the Visitors’ Center and on Sunday, March 17th, at 5:00 p.m. in Falls Church. The early start time on Sunday is to accommodate the Relief Society birthday devotional later in the evening. (I love our church. Where else would people see fit to celebrate a birthday with yet another meeting?)
I continue to enjoy being a part of this choir, both as a middling member of the baritone section and now also as the third-best accompanist! (For a brief time last fall, the choir had five accompanists, of which I was either the fourth or fifth best. But two of the five have since left the choir, and so I have rocketed all the way up to number 3! The other two accompanists are so much better than I am that playing in front of them always makes me tighten up and play even worse. It can get a little embarrassing, but it’s kind of them to let me try.
The choir will also be performing The Redeemer behind Jenny Oaks Baker and several other fabulous soloists at The Music Center at Strathmore on March 28th.
Sadly, I won’t be able to attend. I’ll explain why in next month’s letter. It breaks my heart since singing at Strathmore would be all kinds of fun. I imagine the choir will manage to get along without me. Unlike our other concerts, this one costs money. You can buy tickets at https://www.jennyoaksbaker.com
Our choir is pretty good, but if you want to hear a really good choir, then you’ll want to come to the Visitors’ Center on Easter, March 31st, at 7:00 and listen to Grace sing with the Southern Virginia University Chamber Singers.
And finally, I had the unique opportunity last night to jam with a great group of folks known as the Glen Echo Open Band.
A friend from church who plays with them was hosting the session and invited me sit in on piano for part of the time. They play a wide repertory of fiddle tunes and tolerated my amateurish piano skills for a little more than an hour before replacing me with one of their much better usual pianists. (No hard feelings, my back was starting to feel a little sore anyway.) And the bandleader invited me to join the piano rotation at their next dance (April 5th in the Spanish Ballroom at Glen Echo Park if you want to come) so I guess I wasn’t that bad.
Today I learned that the older guy on the far right with the accordion on his lap has two Grammy Awards! What in, I don’t know, but he’s a pretty amazing musician.
Keep your toes tappin’!
Love,
Tim
Managing Editor of The Famlet Monthly
I look forward to reading this every month!