My Back Has Never Recovered

The Fastest Back Injury in Medical History

There was this woman at my gym who was unbelievably attractive.

And I don't mean just attractive. I mean the kind of woman who somehow caused every guy in the gym to suddenly need the machine closest to wherever she was working out.

Everybody noticed her.

Nobody talked to her.

Including me.

For weeks, I would see her and think about going over, and then immediately convince myself not to. Finally, one day I thought, What the hell am I scared of? Worst-case scenario, she says no and I spend the next six months avoiding eye contact.

So I walked over.

I don't remember exactly what I said. I'm sure it wasn't nearly as smooth as I imagined it was, but somehow it worked.

And to my surprise, she was incredibly nice.

We talked for a few minutes. I complimented her. She laughed. The conversation actually flowed. Eventually, I asked for her number.

She gave it to me.

I walked away trying to act completely normal while internally I was celebrating like I'd just won a championship.

And I swear I could feel every guy in the gym watching me.

Nobody said anything, but their faces said enough.

"This motherfucker actually did it."

I went home and deliberately waited a couple of hours before texting her because apparently I needed to create the illusion that I hadn't been thinking about her the entire drive home.

She told me she was about to take her puppy for a walk.

I said I'd love to join her.

Now, normally that sounds like a guy using a dog to get closer to a beautiful woman, but I genuinely love dogs. We met up, and within five minutes I was on the ground playing with this puppy like I'd known him my whole life.

She was watching us and smiling.

And I remember thinking:

Oh, the dog loves me.

She loves that the dog loves me.

"Gentlemen, we are making tremendous progress."

But I didn't want to rush things, so I asked her on a proper date.

We went out the next night.

Dinner was great. Conversation was great. Chemistry was great.

Eventually, we ended up back at my apartment.

At this point, I couldn't believe how perfectly everything had gone.

Twenty-four hours earlier, I was just some guy at the gym trying to find the courage to say hello.

Now we were making out in my bedroom.

Things started getting heated.

We moved onto the bed.

Her shirt came off.

Then her bra.

Then her jeans.

And somewhere in the middle of all this...

I smelled something.

I stopped for maybe half a second.

"Sniff."

What the hell is that?

It wasn't overwhelming yet. Just enough for my brain to register that something smelled strangely fishy.

For some reason, my first thought was my neighbor.

"Tuna."

The guy must be making tuna.

Perfectly reasonable explanation.

I told myself to focus.

This was not the time to investigate my neighbor's dinner.

So I continued.

Then her underwear came off.

And suddenly...

BOOM.

Mystery solved.

It wasn't the neighbor.

It wasn't tuna.

The smell was coming directly from "her vagina".

My brain completely stopped working.

I actually froze.

There are moments in life when your entire nervous system makes a decision before your conscious mind has caught up.

This was one of those moments.

My body immediately shut the operation down.

Completely.

I had spent the previous twenty-four hours trying to get to this exact moment, and now every cell in my body was screaming:

ABORT MISSION.

The problem was that I had absolutely no idea how to get out of this without humiliating her.

I couldn't exactly sit up and say, "I've conducted an investigation and unfortunately the tuna has been located."

So my brain had maybe three seconds to invent an emergency.

And apparently the best it could come up with was...

My back.

I suddenly threw myself backward onto the mattress.

"AHHHHH!"

She jumped.

"What happened?!"

"My back!"

"What?!"

"My back! Oh my God."

I grabbed my lower back and started rolling slightly from side to side.

This woman went from expecting a romantic evening to apparently witnessing a serious orthopedic emergency in about four seconds.

"Oh my God, are you okay?"

"I don't know. I think I pulled something."

"How?!"

Excellent question.

Apparently taking someone's jeans off had ruptured three discs in my spine.

"I don't know. I moved wrong."

She immediately became concerned.

"Do you need ice?"

"No."

"Do you want me to massage it?"

ABSOLUTELY NOT.

"No, no, don't touch it."

"Should I call someone?"

"No."

"Do you want me to stay?"

And that's when the situation somehow became even worse.

She climbed back onto the bed and said, "It's okay. I'll stay here with you tonight."

My internal voice went into full emergency mode.

TUNA.

TUNA IS STAYING OVER.

I tried to sound like a man bravely suffering through a medical crisis.

"No, honestly. I think I need to be alone."

She looked confused.

"I don't mind staying."

"No, really."

"I can just sleep next to you."

"No."

That one came out a little too quickly.

She stared at me.

I softened it.

"I mean... thank you. That's really sweet. But when my back gets like this, I just need to lie completely still and be alone."

When my back gets like this?

Apparently I now had a history of recurring spinal problems.

She started getting dressed.

I could tell she was embarrassed, confused, and increasingly annoyed.

And honestly, I felt terrible.

But there was no turning back now.

I had committed to the injury.

She finished getting dressed and stood by the door.

"I'll text you tomorrow."

"Absolutely."

She left.

The door closed.

I remained lying perfectly still for about ten seconds in case she'd forgotten something and came back.

Then I sat straight up.

Miraculous recovery.

I started laughing so hard I could barely breathe.

Twenty minutes earlier, I had been congratulating myself on executing the greatest romantic performance of my life.

I approached the girl everybody was afraid to approach.

Got her number.

Won over the puppy.

Got the date.

Got her back to my apartment.

And then, at the finish line, my downstairs neighbor was falsely accused of cooking tuna and I suffered an imaginary spinal injury.

She texted me the next day asking how my back was.

I told her it was still really bad.

At this point, the lie had developed continuity.

She checked on me again a couple of days later.

Still injured.

Then she asked when I was coming back to the gym.

That created another problem.

Because I couldn't exactly tell this woman I'd nearly required an ambulance on Thursday and then have her see me doing deadlifts on Saturday.

So I did the only reasonable thing.

I changed gyms.

For almost a month.

I drove farther away to work out because I had to protect the integrity of a back injury that never happened.

Eventually, the messages stopped.

I still wonder what she thought.

Maybe she genuinely believed I hurt myself.

Maybe she knew exactly what happened.

Maybe she went home and told her friends about the strange guy from the gym whose spine mysteriously collapsed the second her underwear came off.

I'll probably never know.

But I do know one thing.

For several weeks afterward, every time I smelled tuna...

my lower back started hurting.