John Roll

The cover picture is from last August and is of Sue and I on a Rick Steves tour in Norwegian mountains on a tour of Scandinavia. At that time there was no indication of any problem.


In December of 2015, after scraping ice from the driveway, I started feeling discomfort; certainly nothing that could yet be termed pain. I planned to work thru it at the gym. I had spent three days a week working out as part of the regimen to keep my diabetes under control. That and an essentially vegetarian diet was successfully maintaining my A1C (Indicator of my diabetic health) below 6.9 (diabetic - but well managed).


After a few weeks, I was not getting any better, and so I went to Dr Koussaimi  (our GP) who agreed that I needed to work my old body more carefully. So I continued my exercises under the guidance of local Physical Therapists. Another three or four weeks and nothing had changed. It was time for an MRI.  And here we found the first worrying condition. My Lumbar vertebra L5, was compression fractured. Something was not as it should be.

On March 5th, we had gone into Boston to see the Symphony. Coming home, driving thru Sherborn, I reached into my back pocket to retrieve a handkerchief to blot my runny nose. The pain I experienced as I reached was far beyond anything that seemed reasonable. I later discovered that that was when I fractured my L4 vertebra.