For much of my adult life, I suffered a lingering pain in my lower back with sharp spikes that ran down the sciatica in the left leg.

X-rays showed deteriorating discs in my lower back that doctors felt was causing the pain and said surgery would be needed if it got worse.

But the pain stopped when my motorcycle collided with a black steer in the dark night on Nov. 9th, 2012 on U.S, 221 at the bottom of Bent Mountain in Roanoke County. I had a lot of other pains from the multiple injuries that kept me in the hospital for nearly two months, followed by many more periods of extensive rehabilitations and doctors said the pain could return after those injuries healed.

The pain did not return, however, and no one could figure out why. Did the daily intake of Tramadol opiate pain killers mask that pain? Possibly, some doctors said. Use of that drug is a constant that remains nine years after that night. Other said the trauma of the crash may have “knocked one of you back discs back into a less painful location.

Over the next nine years, I enjoyed movement without any back pain.

Then the pain returned last week while working in our yard and struggling to get our motorcycle trailer operational to help transport the bike over to a friend’s house to make it more usable until our rain and storm-destroyed driveway is restored sometime in the near future.

While the back pain and sciatica caused me to hobble and limp, it would go away when I climbed on the Harley and more than 175 miles on back roads in Mt. Rogers was pleasan and pain-free while in the saddle but returned whenever I dismounted.

A trip the doctor brought a short of corozone in the left hip and a regimen of a medication called prednisone : A six-day treatment of six pills on day one, five on day two, four on the third day, three the fourth,, two for the fifth and one for the last.

That seemed to dull the pain, somewhere, with the Tramadol and eight-hour Tylenol arthritis pills allowing me to walk short distances and do assignments like shooting a football game this evening at Floyd County High School.

But what happens after last, and final, pill on Sunday?

Call it the cost of getting old or, more likely, a life of constant abuse of one’s body.