I’ve tried not to comment too much on this United Healthcare CEO murder, since it’s an ongoing thing and obviously the guy was murdered on the street. Additionally, I spend most of my time writing fiction or software and have lived a pretty “normal” life so far without much to complain about, so I don’t have a lot in the way of personal perspective to add to most current events that can’t be better summed up by people smarter than me.

However, yesterday I read this blog post about Luigi Mangione, and for once I have genuine perspective to add. In reality, about half a lifetime’s worth.

When I was what they called a “rising senior” (the summer between my junior and senior years of high school), I went to a couple long-snapping football camps. Ostensibly, this was to make me a better football player, but in reality it was so that our punter/kicker could really shine in the upcoming season, since he was a top-rated kicker who went on to play D1AA football.

At one of these camps, the long-snapping coach had us all sit in a circle with our legs out in front of us, and then went around and pressed on everyone’s back to give them a good stretch. When he did it to me, my lower back popped unexpectedly.

I didn’t think anything of it at the time, but I was flexible enough to get a whole palm on the ground when I stood with my legs straight, so I was surprised he’d gotten it to pop. Nothing changed that day or the next, but a few weeks later I started getting what I could only describe as DOMS in my left butt cheek. I generally say this is the genesis of my sciatic pain, but it was the end of my summer baseball season and I’d played something like fifty games that year plus had football camp so it was probably caused by a lot of use in a short amount of time. Regardless, I thought it was just soreness at first and I’d stretch before games, but it never went away.

Then a few weeks later my senior football season started. I was a lineman and we were a small school so I almost never came off the field. What started as annoying soreness in the summer gradually developed into shooting pain down my left leg during the fall. By the end of the season I was barely practicing but would still play both ways in our games. In class and at home, I either laid down or was very fidgety in my seat because my leg hurt so much when I was sitting. Near the end of class or after turning in a test, I sometimes laid on the carpet next to my desk because the pain was worse than the embarrassment.

I cried after our last game that year, both because it was the last real football game I’d ever play and also because it meant I could finally get real treatment for my leg instead of the very basic electrical stimulation our small-town physical therapist was using. I still hadn’t had imaging, because at the time not only was an MRI expensive but I also didn’t want to lose my senior season of the sport that had become nearly my entire identity.

Then the reality set in. After football was over, the pain only got worse. I got an MRI and was told it was a herniated disc. But it wasn’t just “you have a herniated disc and here’s how to treat it” like I expected. It was “you have a herniated disc” and a literal pat on the shoulder followed by the words “I’m sorry” from the doctor. I was seventeen. I was invincible. And here was this doctor apologetically telling me I was injured in such a way that has always stuck with me. Like she thought she was giving me a death sentence. Something I would never recover from.

And for a very long time, she was right.

I tried physical therapy and some alternative therapies that didn’t fix anything. I missed baseball season. I could only sleep in one position at night and lost twenty pounds of muscle before graduation because I couldn’t do anything without shooting pain down my leg.

I had discectomy about a month before my freshman year of college, which they were hesitant to do until it was so unbearable that I begged for something to help the pain.

The prognosis was good, since I was barely eighteen and otherwise healthy. Of course, the surgery only made things worse. For the entirety of my freshman year of college I slept no more than four hours at a time. I would wake up at 3AM in extreme pain, struggle for an hour until the exhaustion was too much, and then fall back into a fitful sleep. It’s a good thing engineering students never have early classes, or else I’d have failed. (That’s a joke, almost all of my classes for all five years of school were between 8AM and 12PM).

About three months after the surgery I had a follow-up that was supposed to be with the surgeon but I apparently wasn’t important enough so I got to see his physician’s assistant instead.

The man, in his fifties or sixties, asked what a “good” outcome would be. I said I just want to be able to touch my toes again, to which he gave a dismissive laugh and replied “well, I can’t touch my toes”. I left that appointment devastated; not only was I still in terrible pain but the man who cut me open didn’t care enough to see me and his assistant dismissed my pain and healthcare desires outright.

It took until the summer between my freshman and sophomore years of college before I could sleep again. My dad got an inversion table that had only worsened things the year prior, but suddenly it helped. I was able to run and lift again, and though I still had a lot of pain, for most of the day I would be well enough to be active, and then I’d hang on that table when it got worse. My roommates for the rest of my college career can attest to how annoying that thing was to have around, but without it I never would have made it.

My story is getting pretty long in the tooth, so I’ll summarize the rest. I was able to lift and to run mostly to my heart’s content until my mid-to-late twenties. Then during the Pandemic my sciatica flared back to the point that I was only getting three or four hours of sleep a night for months and would move to the floor so that my now-wife would not get woken up by my constant rolling. At one point before it all went downhill I squatted 365 pounds for sets and deadlifted 430 pounds in the same workout. I don’t say this to sound impressive (it’s not, trust me), but to say that you would never have known by looking at me that I was in so much pain, and the day it all went downhill in 2020 I was probably as “fit” as I’d ever been.

That brings me to Luigi Mangione. I saw this image and I thought to myself “that doesn’t look like a man with a lot of back pain”:

And then I remembered. I never looked like this, but by the time I was twenty-six I’d gone through at least a dozen different healthcare providers for my chronic pain. What I had (sciatica caused by a herniated disc) is only about half of what he has, but many of the symptoms outlined in the article above are the same as what I’ve been going through since my last summer of high school. It took me almost fifteen years to get it under control, and it took an incredible physical therapist to finally work through it. Now I’m basically pain-free and I manage the sciatica symptoms daily to the point that I barely notice them anymore.

But what if I hadn’t managed to get my sciatica taken care of a few years ago? What if I was still in so much pain that I could only sleep three hours a night or couldn’t sit at my desk or on a plane without shooting pain? What if I couldn’t crawl on the floor with my son or pick up a chair to unscrew a lightbulb?

It took me almost fifteen years to get things under control, and even now they still do flare up from time to time. I was feeling hopeless that freshman year of college. I was feeling hopeless in 2020, and not just because of the Pandemic. Then I turned a corner with the pain but in 2022 I tweaked my back so bad during a light squat workout that I had to rush to my car so no one would see my tears, and then called in sick the rest of the day and the next day, praying that it would be okay. Do you know how embarrassing it is to hurt yourself and have to call in sick to a job where you sit in front of a screen all day? About as embarrassing as laying on the ground between desks after you turn in a test.

I’m not going to comment on Luigi Mangione’s motives or defend him or say much about what he did at all. Like I said above, there are plenty of truly smart people who can comment on that.

But what I can say is that chronic back pain, whether it be in the back or down the legs due to pinched nerves, feels truly hopeless. There’s nothing in your life you need more than a strong back, and you don’t realize it until yours gives out. The funny thing is that the inversion table that helped so much the first in college only made things worse the year prior. And the daily stretches I do now to keep things under control made things worse five or ten years ago. Your back is a fickle beast, and when it goes the first thing it takes is your mind. You never truly appreciate how much your physical health impacts your mental health until you lose it.