Thanks for the reminder, I also need to take a bit care of myself, I still have problems with my back. If I do 10 minutes of exercise every day I will probably never ever have problems. However, when the pains aren't that acute, it's hard to find the time, place and motivation to do this.
For a full year I wasn't able to work full time by the computer. We have quite good social security systems in Norway, so that was the least of my worry. Health care is supposed to be heavily subsidized in Norway, but I still had to pay quite a lot from my own pockets for physiotherapists. I saw three of them, and they all told me different things - I did learn some things though. In retro-perspective, I could probably have found everything I needed to know through google and youtube, and managed with much less than a year of "downtime" if I had just been careful and doing proper training from the very first time I started to feel back pains.
My biggest problem was to be a good father despite my back pains ... especially towards the youngest daughter that was very hard, she still needs some help taking on and off clothes, she wants to be carried around, she often sat down and denied walking at all when I tried to take her to the kinder garden (and although I had a partial sick leave and this delay was indirectly caused by my back pains, my employer was not impressed when I came late due to that), even today the only good way I've found to get her up from the bed in the mornings is to lift her up from the bed, give her a warm hug and carry her to the breakfast table.
Most of the time I was unable to sit for more than some few minutes. That makes it impossible to do things like driving a car, or taking an airplane. Some of the time I had big problems walking as well, I think I had one or two weeks "off" where my wife had to take care of the family while I was staying mostly at the boat, eventually getting to a physio clinic every now and then, plus short visits to the office.
I would have been totally lost without a supportive wife as well as without economical safety nets (first of all the Norwegian social security system). My only option then would have been to call the child protection services for help - though I'm concerned they would cause more problems than help. Theoretically, the eldest brother is old enough to be able to take some care of the younger siblings, but in practice he's just not good at it.
And the boat really helped me too. At the very worst, it was painful to stand, sit, walk, lie down ... but swimming was quite OK. At the worst I wasn't able to walk the distance from home to public transport, but I was able to moore up the boat pretty close to a train station. Distances are also much smaller at the boat than at home (for instance, at home, the kitchen and toilet are on separate floors). When it's impossible to drive a car and impossible to take an airplane, the boat was also the only option for doing a vacation with my family.
Perhaps you can set a reminder on your phone to do those exersizes each day? I totally get what you mean. I have done the same but with my mental health.
After taking meds for a while and starting to feel better I tend to stop taking them, missing one here and there, and eventually failing to renew the prescription. And it's okay for a little while but then it crashes down and the cycle repeats. 😒
What caused your back pain? That's always a huge fear for me, a friend in high school had issues with the disk between two vertabrae and the pain she was in was horrendous.
I'm glad you were able to get help for it! Your little ones would be grateful if their papa was to keep up the regemine, I'm sure!
It's slightly more difficult than to just spend ten minutes - I need some clean, flat floor space plus some privacy. Well, the latter is not really a requirement, but still ... I don't like people watching me while I lay down at the floor and do silly things. The options are at home, at the deck of the boat and at work. The latter is pretty much out, we have full transparency at work, glass walls everywhere. While I guess it's possible to do the exercises on a dirty floor, I don't really feel like it, so at home I need to vacuum before I can get down on the floor. I bought a robot vacuumer to make this easier, but to be able to run it I first need to tidy up the floor ... which is difficult as the youngest is distributing toys all over the floor faster than what I can clean up.
It seems like the best thing is to clean and vacuum the floor and get the exercises done in the morning, before the kids get up, but it's of course a bit challenging to get early enough up from bed, and not to waste too much of my time checking steemit, mail, etc.