Seeing Double

This is going to be a rambling mashup of Saturday night and all about my shit spine. You’ve been warned.

Saturday night was full on. Firstly, lots of people. SO MANY PEOPLE. When you’ve only seen 2-3 people a handful of times in 7 months the idea of being in a room of over 250 people is overwhelming. 2020 has really taken it’s toll on my mental health which I’m sure many can relate too. It’s also the first time since January I’ve shot a gig and I apparently forgot how to use my flash. Personally I’m preferring to blame the lack of back lighting and big LED screen for my failures. I lost the ability to compose a shot too because I think I took about 80 identical photos. I also thought I’d see how far I could push myself since I’m going to pester the spine surgeon yet again for a better report and that didn’t go so well. My back hurt before I started the night simply because I washed my hair. After the 2nd band finished I was really starting to feel bad, during the 3rd band someone hit me right in the back as I tried to cross the room and I contemplated just quitting for the night while I quite obviously sulked at the back of the room. It’s hard faking it when you know you’re close to crying and I even thought about pulling the hoodie over my head but thought that would just make it more obvious. I took photos of the next act and knew at that point I definitely shouldn’t push it further, but then I went and tripped on the floor and the jolt through my body was too much.

I’m still waiting on Pain Management so I’m still getting through life with no pain relief. Thanks to Covid hospitals weren’t seeing patients for a few months so my first appointment was by phone. I got sent a weeks worth of pain killers to try but the problem is they affected my short-sightedness. I mean it’s not the worse side effect, but it’s super inconvenient. I had my first in person appointment in July and sadly he contradicted what the spine surgeon said about the severity of my scans and asked if I’m been diagnosed with PTSD. Anyone who doesn’t know anything about Scheuermann’s Disease likes to just palm us off as having mental problems, and like sure maybe I do but that’s not why my back hurts! The rheumatologist I saw back in March wrote in his report that Scheuermann’s is a childhood disease and therefore can’t be why I’m having problems now – it’s a childhood disease in that it’s developmental. Your vertebrae don’t magically return to their natural shape when you turn 18 though. The support group I’m on I see so many people who didn’t even know they had Scheuermann’s Disease until their 30’s when debilitating back pain took over their lives out of nowhere and they had scans done which picked it up. Everyone has a very similar story. It’s just proof of how little research has been done about this disease. Pain Management wants to try cortisone injections, something the spine surgeon felt wouldn’t help me, but I have to wait for a hospital appointment to come up before that happens. I’ll be getting one in my neck and one in my spine. FUN! Then it’s wait and see if that even works and if it does I’ll need them redone every 3-4 months. How fun does that sound? I hate needles but right now i’ll try anything because I should be able to survive a 4 hour show.

Everyone kept asking me how I am and what’s new and it’s really hard to answer. It just makes me even more awkward because I don’t know what to say that doesn’t sound depressing and settle for scrunching my face and shrugging. HOWEVER, despite the sulking and epic pain I had fun experimenting with double exposures. 2018-2019 was the year of DIY filters so I wanted to try something different and I liked the effect I got for a lot of the images. These were all done in-camera and to begin with I was trying line up what I was doing but ended up just taking photos and stopped looking at the end product. I found by making sure the first photo was blurry, when the 2nd photo was taken it basically added a cool lens flare effect in some photos. The photos below are few of my favs but you can see the full gallery over on the Breaking Punk page on Facebook.