It's a pain. Literally.

Here's the story on my unscheduled, early return from fishing:

In late July, just before our last two days of the fishing season, I sustained an injury to my lower back. Exactly how it all went down isn't exactly clear to me, since it hit suddenly and without any of the typical warning signs.
Now, I sustain light pains in my back from time to time (I mean, much of my job involves bending over a lot, not to mention lots of twists and turns to my torso... so that's not new) but the pain is usually short-lived (a day or two, max) and it's mostly an inconvenience, nothing really disabling or debilitating.

Not this time.

This pain persisted and then got worse.

After the third day, just getting out of bed proved to be a challenging ordeal: I'd have to gently raise my legs to the edge of the bed, taking care to move my spine as little as possible, lower my feet to the floor while trying to simultaneously raise myself upright using my arms. I've never had anything like this kind of injury and only the pain from my double-hernia operation came anywhere close to as agonizing.

I'm now torn on what to do next.
I don't much like the idea of chirpractors since, to me, they border on quackery and yet I fear seeing an orthopaedic surgeon because, well, surgeons like to cut... and I don't want no cuttin' ....

Anyway, I'm in discussion with Fishermen's Fund -- it's the Alaska Fishermen's equivalent to your "Workmen's Comp" deal that you're probably familiar with -- to decide what to do next.

This little monkeywrench has completely fried my plans for this autumn, which involved staying in Bristol Bay until October then driving the long route (thru California and Arizona) to see my sister and brother on the way to Florida.

Now, I'm not sure what to do.
This pain in the back is a pain in so MANY more ways than one!