Check Out and The Cheese

I've spent the vast majority of the last 4 days in a state of dizziness. A whirlwind bachelorette party weekend at the lake will do that to you, but so will a medication cocktail of Darvocet, Carisoprodol and Steroids.

Let me start from the beginning.

It was a warm and sunny Friday afternoon. After hopping into Brooke's new mommy vehicle (that I am so proud to announce is NOT a mini-van), we arrived at the Tinker Air Force Base commissary for one hell of a grocery shopping experience. Normally I would have been dressed to impress all the single, uniformed hotties on base, but I was running late and feeling rather low maintenance, so for the first time in like EVER, I left the house without a stitch of make up on, toe nails unpolished, a wife beater and butt panties WITH JEANS. I know... the NERVE. But back to the show.

In a matter of a month, I went from buying groceries for one (and I use the term loosely, because I went maybe once a month)... to buying groceries for a family of 4.5... to buying groceries for a BACHELORETTE PARTY OF ELEVEN. It was d i f f i c u l t. Mostly because I inherited my dad's observation skills and kept missing food right in front of my face, but also because I was with BOTH lippy sisters that thought everything I did was ridiculous.

It was right around Dairy that my back started aching, but that wasn't unusual (the back aching, not that it happened around Dairy). Over the last few months, I've had to give myself mini-massages to work out some knots in my lower back, but I just attributed that to regular lifting soreness and didn't think anything of it, until....................

check out and the cheese.

I'll never see an 8 oz bag of mozzarella in the same light. As I bent down to get the cheese and make the routine transfer to the conveyor belt, my life flashed before my eyes as the most excruciating pain I've ever felt shot through my lower back and I felt a pop. And I was stuck. Everything went neon, started tingling and I couldn't catch my breath. I thought I was going to black out. For a second I even thought I was dead, until Alyssa gave me the usual "quit being such a drama queen" look, and it was back to reality.

The reality that I couldn't move, I'd never felt anything so painful, and it was my spine. You know, the thing that HOLDS YOUR BODY TOGETHER. The thing that protects your SPINAL CORD - the body's thoroughfare of information from the brain to the nervous system?!?! I was freaked out, crying like an infant, and most importantly, requesting my sisters stop laughing at me so the cashier and other onlookers would stop following suit. Unbelievable.

Once they got me on a motorized scooter (I don't wanna talk about it), the ambulance put me on a stretcher and away I went. It was a horrible drive of sharp left turns and a painful and USELESS IV, but the EMT provided some unintentional comic relief when she was on the phone with the hospital... "we've got a 27 year old female, 5'4", 120, stats stable, bent over to pick up some cheese..."

Good Lord, how did I get here?