Sarah Calderon

The first time I did a sit-up I never imagined it would be so painful. My back and neck ached during the situp, but the pain wasn’t nearly as intense as it was earlier in the day and I continued down the stairs to the lobby to finish the exercise. I stopped suddenly when I reached the stairs back up the stairs. The pain wasn’t as bad now as I thought that I had initially. I turned around and asked my husband what was going on. He said that the pain was getting worse. I felt that I might collapse from the pain and get caught in the stairs again. I started walking toward the stairs in order to see out of the windows, but the pain was still getting worse. This time I stopped in the lobby and sat back down. I continued to sit there, unable to move an inch. I couldn’t see anything, so I knew the pain was getting worse. After about 10 or 15 minutes I started to get scared because, again, the pain was getting worse. Still, I began to walk backward with the pain in my back and it was getting faster and worse. I fell down onto the floor several times, but I didn’t fall hard, just hard enough where my head hurt. I was sure that I would get pulled out of the house. I think that I was in agony that night but I got back up and went back to my desk.

[This next paragraph is an excerpt from “Getting Help” (September 2009), a book that we recommend to all caregivers.] I thought I was going to die. I have the chronic pain, chronic arthritis, the arthritis in my knees, and the arthritis all over my head—I have my pain, too, and some of it is from a ruptured bone in my neck caused by my mother. My mother had fallen down and hit her head and I have this scar on my neck.

My friend came over one day when I was struggling to get out of bed. He said he understood my pain but he could see that I wasn’t just getting worse. He told me that the doctors had prescribed me the most powerful narcotic in the world to help the pain but that it was making me feel worse. He gave me pills that I wouldn’t be able to take because they would be so difficult to swallow. He also said that the drugs really hurt during the day, but that the night of the incident, I