Last night I experienced my first MRI (Magnetic Resonance Imaging), an interesting milestone in the journey to grasp why the persistent sciatica pain has been plaguing me for nearly two months.

For the uninitiated, an MRI is like a giant camera that uses powerful magnets and radio waves to create detailed images of the body. It’s an ingenious piece of tech that essentially maps out internal structures by analyzing how the body’s molecules respond to magnetic fields. In my case, it was a deep dive into the anatomy of my spine to locate the root cause of the nerve trouble.

The scan required me to stay completely still while the machine did its noisy work, clanging and beeping like something you’d hear inside a 1950s sci-fi spaceship. Surprisingly, I managed to keep perfectly still throughout the scan, which I wasn’t entirely confident about being able to pull off when I first lay down on the machine’s white sled. The young technician operating the MRI was forthcoming and soft-spoken, his demeanor helped settle any trepidation I might have had when the sled slid into the imaging tunnel.

I was provided with giant headphones that played muzak – bland elevator tunes – and the technician kept a watchful eye on me through a monitor in the clinic’s control room to ensure I wasn’t inadvertently fidgeting, as this would have blurred the images. Of course, lying there for an extended period, about 16 minutes, gave my mind time to wander. Toward the very end of the scan, I started having obsessive thoughts about sneezing or coughing or having some muscle twitch involuntarily.

Fortunately, none of this happened, and I made it through without disrupting the imaging process.

For those unfamiliar, the sciatic nerve is the body’s largest nerve, running from the lower spine like the root of a tree through the buttocks and down each leg. The sciatic nerve is responsible for much of the sensation and movement we have in the lower body. When unnaturally compressed, it becomes inflamed and can cause anything from mild tingling to severe, shooting/radiating pain – a condition aptly named sciatica and with symptoms I have become all too familiar with.

In the meantime, I’m preparing for today’s cortisone injection, delivered directly into the right buttock. This targeted anti-inflammatory treatment aims to calm the nerve at its source and hopefully provide some much-needed relief.

If nothing else, this ordeal has humbled me insofar that I realize now how fragile my body has become with age and that it isn’t bouncing back or self-healing as it once did. I suppose this is to be expected and I believe I touched on this very topic in my book, The Aging Man’s Survival Guide.

Our daughter Elle wished me a happy Swedish Father’s Day a few hours ago. It warmed my heart, of course.

But for me, as someone who never had a present father, Father’s Day is also a somewhat painful reminder of how utterly my father failed in that role, and perhaps that, in turn, this explains some of my own shortcomings as a father. But not just for me – but also for all the children from three of his four marriages.

My father’s name was Ernest, and his father’s name was William, but he was called Bill. I know I met Grandpa Bill when I was a little boy, but I have absolutely no memories of him.

However, I’ve heard fow tough Bill was, from several people especially towards his three sons: Ernest, Albert, and Aaron. He was particularly hard on my father, who, after his time in the US Army, chose to move to Sweden, write poetry, and learn about art.

After their divorce, my chronically bitter mother said that my father had become deeply disturbed by what he had seen and experienced while stationed as a journalist in France during World War II. That because he never dealt with what we now call post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) upon his return home, he was emotionally troubled and couldn’t function as part of a family.

It’s possible that’s how it was, and yes, that theory does help me a little when I try to understand why he left our family in 1969, just before I was about to turn 6 and my brother Tyko was 4 years old.

Even though it’s the most amazing and undoubtedly the most important thing I’ve ever done in my life, fatherhood hasn’t always been easy for me. Sure, I can blame some of my many flaws on the fact that I had two poor role models myself. And who hasn’t had complicated relationships with their parents?

But perhaps it becomes even more complicated for us guys when your father abandons the ship early on.

I remember how, as a young boy, I would feel envious of my friends and the relationships they had with their fathers. Especially when the dads seemed decent, and they looked like they were having fun together.

It was always tough to leave those moments because on the way home, I was reminded of the great void I had in my heart.

As I said, Father’s Day is complicated for me. But I wouldn’t be half the father I am to Elle if I hadn’t been lucky enough to meet wise and stable Charlotte. So, I’m more than happy to share this day with her.

The above photo was taken in the late 1920s along New Jersey’s Atlantic City Boardwalk (where the show Boardwalk Empire plays out). My father Ernest and his two brothers Albert and Aaron accompanied by their parents, my paternal grandparents, William and Jenny Raboff.

Today, I went on the longest walk I’ve managed in some six weeks – alas, modest victory, though not without the occasional throb and pang. Charlotte and I ambled quietly through “King’s Park,” a setting so splendidly colorful it seemed to dare me to feel more optimistic about the state of the world.

Now, as I distance myself from what any sane observer would surely call a colossal, even cataclysmic train wreck, I can’t help but reflect on certain American family members who have been happily onboard that train for some time. Others have more recently adopted a new level of isolationist and tribal zeal which is so profound that they’ve even dispensed with the family name altogether, as if cutting loose from shared history will somehow render them free from its ancient weight. Inevitable, I suppose. Genealogy aside, what did we ever truly have in common? Apparently, not enough to stir a desire for new shared chapters.

Ah, c’est la vie.

Sunday. Malmö. Not Madeira.

If you saw me right now, you’d be wondering what the heck I’m up to. I’m writing these loosely thought-out lines in bed, lying face down, naked, on a rainy Malmö afternoon.

To get into a somewhat reasonable writing position, I’ve propped myself up on three large pillows.

The radiator, which normally sits at 1, is now cranked up to 4, and there’s a faint, yet pungent, smell of mustiness in the room that usually only gets tolerated when one of us has been floored by a stubborn cold.

On my right, bare buttock, there are two black electrodes attached. Further down, on the outer side of my right thigh, two more are glued.

The electrodes are square and look like large bandaids, with the distinct difference that they’re connected by thin wires to a small, plastic remote control with a display and several pushbuttons.

At the top of the tiny screen, it reads “Massage,” and by pressing one of two arrows, I can increase or decrease the electrical tension that makes the muscles in my right buttock and down my thigh either contract or relax.

You can hardly see the muscles moving under the skin, but if I increase the current enough, Charlotte says she can see tiny “ripples” on the skin around the electrodes.

Down at the bottom of my right leg, there’s a heating pad wrapped around my foot, held in place by the belt from my old, worn-out bathrobe.

Without the heating pad, the foot is completely numb and cold. It mostly feels like a heavy lump of ice, and my normally graceful stride is currently a distant memory.

On the bedside table, there are two kinds of tiger balm, a tube and a jar, along with a large glass bowl where packs of Advil, Paraflex, Etoricoxib, and Dolcontin are jumbled together.

I don’t like looking at the pile of meds, much less taking them, since all they’ve managed to do so far is make me a) constipated, b) overly loose, or c) foggy-headed, and a messy combination of two out of the three.

None of the pills have helped me with the pain, which is rooted in my lower back and then shoots down my leg, all the way to my, currently, thawed big toe.

Somehow, by some unexplained mechanism, I’ve managed to pinch the otherwise fairly anonymous sciatic nerve, and it seems it’ll take a miracle to un-pinch the bastard.

I’ve been dragging myself around with this paralyzing condition for nearly four weeks, and I’m literally and figuratively sick of it.

Unlike the grinding ache that arthritis brings, and which I’ve patiently lived with for over a decade, the sharp pain triggered by the sciatic nerve is an infernal hell.

It’s nearly impossible to describe pain; it’s such an intensely personal experience.

But try imagining someone sticking a long, rusty screwdriver into the middle of one buttock and then twisting it in wide circles with powerful motions. Now imagine they left the tool wedged there, so you couldn’t walk, stand, sit, or lie down without it pressing deeper.

That’s how it’s been for almost a month for me.

You can probably picture all the situations where that screwdriver makes it hard to do normal things without either squealing like a stuck pig or whining like an old wildebeest.

Whether the situation is akin to a month-long labor I’ll leave unsaid… but in a delivery ward, at least there’s nitrous oxide – which I’m thoroughly convinced provides much better pain relief than anything in the arsenal of pharmaceuticals piled on my bedside table.

One step forward, two steps back.

The worst part has been the uncertainty. None of the healthcare providers I’ve spoken to or met with know more than I do about how long this will last. Yet there’s no shortage of well-meaning, but unfortunately completely useless, advice (and some outright quackery).

Almost as bad is how some days I think I can see a glimmer of improvement, only to have a severe relapse the next day, where moving more than a few meters at a time is nearly impossible.

Even just standing up to relieve myself can be so painful I’d rather embrace dehydration. Not to mention when I occasionally have to sit down….

Right now, I’m rather alone with my pain. “Nurse Charlotte” has fled the field hospital (the bedroom) for warmer, less whiny climes. Who can blame her?

My dear wife truly deserves a sunny holiday from her temporarily gray, pain-ridden husband.

Hell, I need a holiday from myself.

Today, I once again slowly made my way to our local store. It’s become my daily training routine since the nerve got pinched.

As usual, I had to pause a couple of times along the way to let the tingling in my buttock, leg, and foot ease off a bit.

I try to think positively; since I can at least manage to walk slowly and with a slight waddle to and from the store, I can’t reasonably be that sick. But as an occasional hypochondriac, I’m still not fully convinced.

The past few mornings, I’ve done a stretching session with various yoga and qigong poses, and even though it hasn’t led to any noticeable improvement, it’s felt good to move carefully without it paining me too much.

I’m now hoping that the combination of gentle exercise, the heating pad, tiger balm, and electrodes will get that otherwise quiet sciatic nerve to relax again and eventually return to whatever purpose it actually serves.

Not least, I hope that when Charlotte returns from Madeira in a week, she’ll be spared the sight of me lying on my stomach with electrodes attached to my bare butt.

For even after 26 years of marriage, that view can’t be something she longs to come home to. Rather the opposite; she’s half-seriously threatened to extend her stay on the island.

I captured this hurried flamingo in the Camargue wetlands near the Étang de Vaccarès in the south of France. There were hundreds of these delicate birds in a large saltwater lagoon near the Rhône River delta, between the Mediterranean Sea and the city of Arles. It’s known for its unique biodiversity, including the iconic Camargue horses.

Here are the books I’ve produced over the last 12 months. The Aging Man’s Survival Guide was initiated while we were in Greece, and I began working on the Portugal book – featuring images from about ten years of shorter and longer stays there – while we were in Italy.

Bangkok was mostly produced in Thailand this past summer, and I started working on the coffee table book Västra Hamnen last year in Vietnam. Finally, the book Varvsstaden was largely compiled here in Sweden during June and July.

I don’t measure my creative accomplishments against anyone but myself. These days, most of my friends, with a few exceptions, don’t work creatively or have creative hobbies. That’s not to say they can’t be creative – many of them are, in one way or another – but their day jobs are typically rational and structured, leaving very little room for the kind of projects that devour most of my waking hours. C’est la vie.

Therefore, I only measure and benchmark my creative output against what I’ve previously been able to produce, relative to a combination of my expectations and capacity.

As I age, my health is the key to my productivity.

As long as I eat healthy and keep my body reasonably fit, the creative ideas keep flowing and the thousands of decisions I need to make in say, the course of a book project, are executed without too much hesitation or overthinking.

I find that my photography books are fairly straightforward to produce. I’ve made over 20 by now, and although I don’t by any stretch of the imagination consider the process “easy,” my accumulated experience since the very first book in 2005 certainly makes starting a new book project feel a lot less intimidating and daunting.

I’m currently working on a new book right now, narrowing the image count from about 300 photographs to roughly 60 carefully curated candidates. Once that’s done, I’ll spend about two weeks deciding where to place each of the finalists on the book’s 90 or so pages.

I’ve got a couple of other books in the works, but I’m going to keep a lid on them until I’m further down the road…

I will be presenting and talking to visitors about my book “The Aging Man’s Survival Guide” at Bokmässan in Göteborg on September 27-28, 2024. You can listen to the book’s background and my author’s presentation by scanning the following QR code. Looking forward to making new acquaintances and meeting some old friends while at the annual book fair at Svenska Mässan across the street from Liseberg and near Gothia Towers, where, back in the mid-1980s, I worked in a bar on the building’s top floor. This was when there was only a single “tower” and it stood out like nothing else in Göteborg. Which I’m hoping my book about aging men, an under-discussed topic if there ever was one, will do as well.