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		Don't Forget to Dance And other lessons of an aching back. By Herbert Hadad The car sped north on the state highway. My wife drove. I was slumped in the backseat almost below window level, like a mobster trying to avoid the cameras. I was just trying to find a comfortable position. We were going to see doctor number three. In a series of time-lapse moments, my life had turned inside out. Just a few weeks earlier, I’d been an athletic middle-aged husband/father/writer/teacher/government official, a good neighbor, a prankster, a bon vivant who flirted at parties and danced with martini abandon at weddings and banquets. I’d even recently revived my Famous Corkscrew Dance, requiring the skills of Rudolf Nureyev and Jim Carrey. Sliding away from my partner, I’d leap into the air, attempt a double or a triple axel, and pray to land on my feet, arms thrown open in triumph. My children found it hilarious. Now I was a helpless old man. Evelyn pulled open the door to the doctor’s office, and we walked from the winter’s cold to the waiting room. I looked around: I was in the house of the damned. The faces that did not glisten with pain were taut with grim forbearance. One man sat in a giant high chair, holding his cane in front of him, regaling the other visitors with an account of his pain. “I wanted to shoot myself,” he said. “Seven operations,” said a plump woman, “but I refuse to wear a collar again.” Across the room, an exceedingly slim woman chimed in: “I screamed. I crawled.” Off in a corner near the receptionist, another patient, a handsome man, ignored the strange camaraderie. I had two ruptured discs in the small of my back. Pinched nerves sent cruel pain down my left leg. But in the land of the blind, I was the one-eyed king. As I watched and listened to the others, for a fleeting moment I felt grateful. When it was my turn with the doctor, I told him I hurt every day, sometimes all day. I couldn’t sit or drive. I couldn’t put on my left shoe. I couldn’t work. Sleeping was difficult. I could lie on my back, but I couldn’t roll to either side, not to hug my wife or to turn on the radio. I got around the house with the help of a walking stick meant for hiking in the woods. “I don’t want to see the MRIs yet,” the doctor said. “Then I’d be treating the picture instead of the patient.” He examined me and asked a lot of questions. When I told him I loved racquetball, he fell into a crouch and swung his arm as if he were playing. “That’s absolutely out,” he said. “See how that motion engages the back? And look how your left thigh has shrunk.” He prescribed medications to dull the nerves and relax the damaged area. “Since you belong to a health club,” he said, “when you feel up to it, I want you to go to the pool and walk in the water up to your chest.” It sounded like the kind of exercise given to soldiers recovering from battle injuries. Though the doctor was an orthopedic surgeon, he said, encouragingly, “I think we can avoid surgery.” The last time I’d done my usual workout at the club was on a Sunday before the winter holidays. Evelyn was at home getting ready for company. After a brisk forty-five minutes on a treadmill, I grabbed my racquet and went looking for a game, inviting a woman I’d seen around the courts. “Sure,” she said, “let’s go.” She had a loopy serve that was easy to return, but she was a skillful, swift opponent. We played for an hour, ultimately ignoring the more or less even score. I returned home feeling great. A few days later, the pain struck. Evelyn is the most sympathetic person I’ve ever met; she could not have been more solicitous or kind. But even her sympathy had limits. After fussing over me around the clock for several days, she said, “You’re being punished for playing with another woman.” I missed two holiday parties at my U.S. Justice Department office, as well as one given by the FBI. I missed my wife’s office celebrations. I went to some neighborhood parties and stood for a while with a drink in my hand, but my skin was gray, and I’d lost weight. I felt old, and it showed. I couldn’t even shop for my family and friends. On Christmas Day, I participated by lying on a couch and turning my head to watch everyone open gifts. I don’t think I’m different from most people. I’ve dreamed of being a hero, of diving onto the subway tracks to save the woman shoved off the platform by the madman. I’ve pictured myself racing to the house fire and catching the precious children as they leap from a second-story window. I would be injured; it would be worth it. But this was pitiful. The previous summer, we’d taken part in an annual sailboat race along the Maine coast. Even after the seas grew rough, I continued photographing the action on deck. Suddenly, the boat swung wildly, and I was thrown backward, into the brass latch of a cabinet. It punched me in the small of the back. I told the doctor that story. “No,” he said, studying the MRI pictures now. “That didn’t do it.” “I haul firewood. I heft boxes of files,” I said. “This just happened,” he said. “It’s wear and tear. Look—your discs in the upper back are in great shape, the discs of a youngster. What happened to you could have been caused by something as simple as stepping out of bed in the morning.” He said the injury might heal in six months. I needed to work. I needed the distraction and demands of my office routine. I wanted to feel I was contributing to the Justice Department’s efforts. I wanted to continue my freelance writing. I told my office to expect me the next day. It takes eight minutes to drive from our home to the little train station on the Hudson River. Halfway there, the sitting triggered such agony that I wanted to unlatch the door and roll into the street. I stood for the forty-minute train ride to Manhattan. I stood all day, at my computer, in a Chinese restaurant. I ran into a colleague with whom I used to swap punches on the shoulder. “I’m happy to see you, my friend,” he said. “Let me have one.” I shot a jab at his shoulder. He didn’t pull punches. “Sorry to tell you this,” he said, “but you’ve lost it.” Ever since my brief career as a boxer, I’d always believed I had a weapon to use in an emergency. Whether truth or illusion, I felt I could punch my way out of danger, protect my family with my fists. Now that weapon had been taken away. I stood during the train ride home, squirmed during the eight-minute car ride, and entered the house exhausted. I met the doctor at the hospital. I put on a skimpy gown. Someone took my pulse and blood pressure and asked a few questions. Then I lay on my stomach on an operating table while the doctor, assisted by nurses and a technician at a fluoroscope, injected steroids into my back. One of the nurses said, sweetly, “You have the most beautiful back I’ve seen in twenty-eight years on the job.” As she walked me, arm in arm, back to the recovery room, I whispered, “You are the loveliest nurse in this unit.” “You men are all the same,” she answered. Spirits lifted, hopes revived, I managed to drive home by myself. One morning a week or so later, still confined to the house, I shambled into the living room and lowered myself onto the couch, ready to delve into one of the handful of books within reach. The old stereo system was piping music into the room. The Glenn Miller Band’s “In the Mood” came on. I rose. I lifted my arms, snapped my fingers, and cakewalked across the room. The wonderful saying “Dance as though no one is watching” flashed into mind. I shifted direction and began to jitterbug, paused, then did a stylish two-step to stay with the music. Suddenly, I stopped cold. What was I doing? I asked myself. I was tempting fate. I could have been the sad joke in the television commercial. I could have been the person who fell and couldn’t get up. But I was up, and I was fine, and I was excited. I dialed my wife in the city. “Evelyn,” I said, “I just danced!” She was excited, too. “Oh, darling,” she said. “You’re going to get better.” Herbert Hadad, Northeastern graduate and award-winning writer, is planning a major athletic comeback, date as yet unknown.