Jocko Underground: Getting Old and Hurt. The New Standard.
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This is the Jocko Underground Podcast number 166, here to answer questions and provide guidance and various courses of action for situations and for life. Let's get into it. First question. Hey guys, what advice would you have in my situation? Early 30s, male with young family, was always in great shape and have always worked labor slash skilled labor jobs with only a high school education. I believe my family is being...

ready for i believe firmly in being ready for anything and being the protector over my family however five years ago i hurt my back at work i find out i have two herniated discs in my back causing me severe sciatic pain down my leg pain and stiffness in my lower back there are days when i can hardly move some days are all right many it's not i just can't do half the things i used to

It's getting to a point where I'm no longer as strong as I used to be. I can't work out without causing a flare up. I'm not in shape anymore. I'm not as productive in manual labor as I used to be. And I'm constantly in pain. Is this a situation where I just quote unquote suck it up or pursue doctors to try to come up with the money to fix this issue? Or what would you suggest to get better?

My life back and be able to become the man my family needs if it helps jobs and skills include hunting guide automotive technician farm work heavy equipment mechanic and sonic drill operator Well pretty straightforward here. Um, yeah, you need sounds like you need to get some help. Um, I had neck surgery I had what you've had two bicep surgeries. Have you had knee surgeries? Yes, sir. What did you get knee surgery? 1996 oh damn long time ago back in the day. What kind?

Full reconstruction and so ACL MCL wait MCL to lateral LCL How'd you hurt that one football you couldn't just suck it up well So I woke up one day and Well, I was actually training jujitsu and I was rolling with my buddy mark and all of a sudden out of nowhere my arm just like started to hurt and felt really weak and

I finished the round and I was like, well, something's wrong with me. I woke up, went home, went to bed, woke up and I couldn't move my right arm. Like it wasn't really moving. Moved it a little bit, but not really. Got a little better over the next couple of days, but it was weak. I couldn't do a dip. I couldn't do one dip. Not one. Just boom. Like there was no strength at all.

And so went in. Yep. I had some shit going on in my neck and the doc was like, yep, let's schedule for surgery. And of course I stretched it out and stuff like that for the next four or five weeks. It got a little bit better, but it was just gnarly, man. It was like, I, I got to where I could do like one dip or two dip dips. So yeah, it's,

There's mechanical things that can go wrong in your body that just need to get repaired. Those are just the facts. I agree with putting off surgery if possible, right? Now with nerve damage, it's a little bit different. So that's the situation with my neck. The doc's like, hey, listen, if you don't get this, if we don't do surgery,

It may or may not improve and it could get worse and the longer you wait and we do do surgery, it's causing more and more nerve damage over time so it may get to a point where the nerve is now permanently damaged and may never recover. And so that's what sped it up. That's why I was like, "Okay, let's do surgery then." Oftentimes with injuries, especially with the back, with the neck, but with everything, with shoulders, with everything.

The first thing you start off with is hardcore physical therapy, like very disciplined physical therapy. Are you doing all the stretching, hour of stretching? That's what you got to do. Like in this case, you got that sciatica down the back. You got to stretch. You got to decompress. They're going to put you in the rack. They're going to pull. They're going to try and get you...

Get that thing to recover and it does oftentimes it does I've had I've had my back on freaking blown out and felt like crap and been injured then recovered, you know I was Talking to someone the other day who had like some little nagging injury and it was a young person and they were kind of complaining about it And I said, yeah. Yeah. Yep I've had a thousand little nagging injuries that you think are never gonna go away They do you just work around them and you get through them, but sometimes it's something more serious than that. So I

You want to do a disciplined commitment to physical therapy. And if you got to give that a little bit of time, maybe that's three months, maybe that's two months, maybe that's six months, but you got to give it some time. And then if that doesn't work, then it's like, okay, we got to check out the surgical options or actually then we go, what's a stem cells, right? Then we go meds, we go injection, like the, the steroid injection into the thing. What's that called?

Cortisol. Cortisol. Right into the... No, cortisone. Cortisone. Right into the spot. Like there's a bunch of steps you can take. Iterative steps. And then eventually if none of that works, eventually you go, okay, we have a mechanical issue in there. I've got a piece of disc or a piece of bone hitting the nerve. That's what it is. And it needs to get moved. It's just a mechanical issue. Now...

And so that's what you're going to need. Now you probably need someone to help you with all everything I just said. The physical therapy, someone's going to go like, okay, let's do this stretch. Let's work on this. Let's pull your head over here. Let's push your back over here. You know, like someone that's helping you. Now it sounds like from your question, you don't have insurance in your current scenario. You need to get insurance ASAP. Like you need to get insurance ASAP. You need to go and find an insurer and be like, yeah, you know, I've been working for a while and I need to get insurance.

And do it while you're as healthy as you can possibly be. When you're as healthy as you possibly be so that you don't red flag a bunch of pre-existing conditions. You see what I'm saying? So you want to let this thing heal up a bit, then you go in there, yep, good to go. Let's get some insurance. That's what you need. And by the way, you mentioned that you got hurt at work. Like what work were you doing?

Did you get workman's compensation? Did you get this stuff documented? What was the company? Was it a big company? Like you can't have permanent damage to your back They should be they should be helping you out here. So then you may be too late You may have been getting paid under the table. I don't know but there is a possibility there. But yes Get some insurance today. Will you hear this go find an insurance person? I

Be like, yep, hey, I haven't had health insurance. I want to get my family on a plan. And it's expensive, by the way. Like I'm very lucky because I was in the military for 20 years. So my insurance is the U.S. military. But insurance is expensive. It's like a family insurance, $1,500 a month. Is that accurate, Echo Charles? Slightly more, yeah. Yeah, $2,000 a month. Like it's very expensive. Very expensive. When you have this kind of degeneration

debilitating pain and suffering It's it's gonna be worth it and not to mention if one of your kids gets hurt or sick or whatever so get into Get you go get insurance ASAP man, and then follow that thing that I just said get insurance Look on the look on the internet about backstretch and psychos Attica. I'll dude I'll do that all day. You can say whatever you want about me like if I get some weird

I'll go to YouTube or the internet and be like, "Hey, I got pain over here." Oh, they'll recommend three stretches. Oh, there'll be some guy on there that'll be like, "Hey, oh, if it hurts over here, here's a stretch that you can do." Cool, I'll try that. Doesn't work after four days? Some other guy said, "Someone else try that one too." Maybe I'll try two at once. You know what I'm saying?

I don't throw away the internet just because it's the internet, man. There's some knowledgeable people on the internet and I'll take advantage of that. So go try some of that. Maybe then you go, okay, I need some, go see a physical therapist. And then a physical therapist will go, hold on a second. What do we got here? And then you start performing the protocol that they put you through. Hope, look, you can completely recover.

from, what is it, slip? You can completely recover from herniated discs in your lower back, completely. I've known many people that have done that. They stretch, they decompress their spine, they hang upside down. There's all kinds of things you can do. And the disc is like this weird mushy thing, and if you allow it some time to rest, it can kind of go back in and get away from your nerves. So that's what we hope for. But sometimes it's just like brutally damaged.

And you need to get, you got to, like I said, it's like a car with a broken axle, bro. Doesn't matter that you want it to keep driving. It ain't going to keep driving. It's a mechanical problem and you just have to get it fixed. So sounds like you've been pushing hard early thirties. You've been doing some hard work your whole life, you know, farm work, heavy equipment, hunting guide. Like that's all some hard work. You pushed hard.

It sounds like you need to recover from the situation. You need to get insurance ASAP and then go through that protocol. Starting with PT, going through all the way through injections and stem cells and last resort, surgery.

And by the way, I don't want to say like last resort. I had surgery on my neck. It was freaking great. I have a friend that went and got surgery on his neck and like the next day was 100%. Like all this excruciating pain from all this time, next day was good to go.

I've had people with mixed results as well. Oh feeling better Greg chain got neck surgery. He's doing great I rolled with freaking Greg train the other day. He was an animal. He's all pissed - he's like he's got pent-up rolls in him, you know, and I'm like, bro Take it easy, man. I'm over here trying to just you know, do jiu-jitsu. He's over here trying to fight me MMA style But he got neck surgery. Yeah

And I'm literally putting him in guillotines. And, you know, we, at the beginning, we're like, hey, you know, easy on Greg's neck. I'm like, cool. This, this, this, this, this dude was not going easy with Jack. He was using his head as a weapon, by the way. Yeah. And keep in mind too, with him, that was recently. That's not like, oh yeah, two years ago and he's fully recovered. No, no, no, no, no. This was like within the last, I think two or three months. Yes. Yes. And he's out rolling with Jocko's guillotine, by the way. With my guillotine. Yeah. Yep.

Yes, I will say I backed off the guillotine a little bit. Thank you. Just out of like not wanting to be that guy. Sure. Makes sense. But I was pushing on his head. I was grabbing his neck, you know, like kind of normal stuff. I wasn't trying to finish a guillotine like his first day back rolling with after getting disc replacement, I think at two levels. So that is a little excerpt of what we are doing on the Jocko Underground podcast. So if you want to continue to listen,

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