Oops, I accidentally chose the same inspo for my show as the world's favourite murderer and I feel very outgunned

Back pain is a radical motivator

So picture this, it’s 2019 and I’m continuing my life as a massive goth. I have big hair, big make-up, I’m shaving off half my eyebrows to draw better ones on. And Robert Smith off of the Cure has just done an interview.

“Congratulations! The Cure Rock and Roll Hall of Fame Inductees 2019! Are you as excited as I am?!” shrieks the sequinned interviewer with the mic, American enthusiasm bordering on mania.

“By the sounds of it, no” says our man Mr Smith, nasal and bitchy. I love him.

Algorithms being algorithms, I see it immediately, chuckle, and move on with my day. Someone posts it in the group chat, we smile at our shitty little boy, and move on with our days. Then a work friend tags me in it. Then the deluge begins.

People I haven’t spoken to in years are sending me the interview. One of my school teachers (who frequently disciplined me for non-regulation hair/make-up/uniform) tags me in it. This becomes my life for at least six months. The sound of it brings out seething violence inside thatI have to smile through. Two years later, my girlfriend sends me the video so often I have to sit her down and tell her plainly that this will genuinely hurt our relationship if she continues.

Five years on, I’ve cut my hair, I’m exploring colour, I can’t be bothered to do make-up everytime I leave the house. No longer looking like Robert Smith’s biological child, the videos trickle out, and I’m safe. I’m safe to continue my work as a comic to write this silly comedy show about my back injury and my recovery from it. My physio gave me a copy of The Back Mechanic by Prof. Stuart McGill, which I read cover to cover, and transforms how I live my life and move my body, and I feature his work heavily- even naming my show after his recovery process ‘Spine Hygiene’. The show makes its debut on 9^th November, 2024, and all is well.

On the 4^th of December, 2024. Brian Thompson, CEO of UnitedHealthcare, was shot three times in the back outside The Hilton, New York. On each of the bullets is carved “Deny, Defend, Depose”, parodying the “Delay, Delay, Deny” motto of health insurance companies. He leads the police on a wild goose chase on his bike, dropping a backpack near the scene of the crime which the bomb squad discovered is filled with monopoly money. The police suspect the gun used, so silent passerby’s don’t hear the shots, is a veterinarian’s gun, used for killing pigs"*. The killing was comedically planned and brilliantly executed.

*This later turned out to be a 3D Printed gun with a surpressor.

Luigi Mangione is arrested on the 9^th of December, ordering hashbrowns in an Atloona McDonalds. He has a full confession on him. Once his name went public, his socials were found. The header of his X (formerly twitter) profile is an X-Ray of his spinal fusion surgery, and his Goodreads shows multiple books about chronic pain, the medical industrial complex, and back pain specifically: Becoming a Supple Leopard by Dr Kelly Starrett and Glen Cordoza, Crooked by Catherine Jakobson Ramin, and The Back Mechanic by Stuart McGill, rated 5 stars.

I start getting tags, and forwards, and messages. It’s a bit more niche, a bit more dark than Robert Smith being a grumpy old man- but it’s also a damning indictment of how hard my late twenties has hit me, that I’ve gone from Goth Girl to Bad Back Girl in five years.

What inspired me to do a stand-up comedy show about backpain has inspired a man in America to commit a murder.

There’s this thing in comedy- sometimes, someone else is doing the same joke as you. Not plagiarism, just multiple discovery. Often happens with politics or current events, there’s only so many ways you can spin things and sometimes two people have the same concept and it’s fine- they get together, find out who did it first and the latecomer has to cut their losses on a perfectly good bit. I don’t feel this really works with me and Luigi, as I have been hugely, monstrously, horrifically outgunned.

And good for him, like. Innocent til proven guilty ofc ofc ofc. The American insurance-based healthcare system sounds like a nightmare.

When I was reading Back Mechanic by Stuart McGill, there was heavy critique of the medical system all the way through:

“Although these [Work Hardening Programs] are popular with compensation boards and insurance companies, the truth is that although they help some individuals, they often hurt others… While some will respond well to this structure and survive to return to work, others will be driven to more tissue breakdown… Work Hardening Programs are not permitted to make allowances for individualized rates of progress. This flies in the face of the laws of nature and biology. In the published reports of the effectiveness of Work Hardening Programs, a “drop out rate” is typically listed. Those who were unable to complete the program because their condition worsened would fall under this catagory and be labelled “non-compliant” insinuating it was the patients fault… Such reports are just fine with the firms and insurance companies as this gives them an excuse to label anyone not suited to the program as “non-compliant” and typically leads to the patient being removed from the insurance company’s liability list.”

The Back Mechanic by Prof. Stuart McGill, p.g. 18.

My back had ‘gone’ a few times before I received proper medical investigation. The second time it ‘went’, I had a phone appointment with the doctor, a waste of both our time. He told me it was muscular, and to do more yoga and go to the gym more- and of course, lose weight. At the time I was working 37.5 hours a week in a bookshop, on my feet constantly and lifting heavy objects in bad ways. It took specifically requesting a physical therapist to give me a once over and get me an MRI, suspecting a tear in my L4/5 disc.

The waiting list was a long wait, and the pain was hideous. Because it was disc pain rather than muscular, ibuprofen gel didn’t touch it. It felt like Velcro being pressed into sunburn on my lower back, too nagging and annoying to sink into or ignore. I couldn’t sit, stand, or lay in one position for more than 30 minutes at a time, I spent weeks hobbling round my flat trying to work from my phone or an iPad because sitting at my desk was excruciating. All physicality had to be removed from the June showings of Wretched, my previous solo show. I also had sciatica, immobilising pain shooting down my left bumcheek and leg, making sitting, walking and standing excruciating. The only thing I found touched the pain was An Entire Bottle of Wine, and the codeine tablets (opiates) I bought for a bad migraine last year. During this wait, I’d been prescribed Stuart McGill’s Big Three spine exercises to stabilise my spine, and the pain improved.

The MRI and my experiences getting it is a prominent bit of Spine Hygiene, but the short version is: after a 6 week wait, I had my MRI in the back of a van outside Nottingham Train Station, and then had two weeks to wait for the results. In my initial appointment with my physiotherapist, he expressed frustration with how I’d been fobbed off for two years- those appointments cost the NHS more than the £169.31 it costs the NHS for an MRI. Or £113.44 if you have a railcard.

In America, an MRI can cost anywhere between $400-$12,000, depending on the hospital’s location, the injury location, and the patient's insurance. Most healthcare plans have deductibles or co-payments, so I would have paid several hundred dollars out of pocket to even get in the room. Medical debt bankrupts families and keeps patients in predatory cycles of poverty. As my financial situation is now, I wouldn’t have been able to afford it even with the intervention of Obamacare- and I can see a road where I being to rely on the codeine and/or Whole Bottle Of Wine route to addiction and ruin.

Luigi Maglione had back pain. After an injury, he had surgery fusing his lower vertebrae together with a titanium plate. My MRI revealed that I have Bertolotti’s Syndrome, that I was born with my L5 vertibrae fused to my sacrum. In both of our cases, the pain comes from the lack of movement in the lumbar spine causing problems in the discs above- a common problem with fusion surgeries like this.

In the months before the killing, his friends and family reported that he’d isolated himself from him them- even reporting him missing on 7^th November 2024. In the aftermaths of my back ‘going’- instabilities and disc delamination caused by my birth defect- I was snappy and inattentive, constantly uncomfortable and distracted and angry, so so angry. And scared. What if this was the rest of my life?

I got better, and the show is about getting better. I look at my beginning notes, and see jokes about accepting dropped objects no longer exist, as I couldn’t bend down to pick things up, and can’t relate anymore. I’m painfree, most of the time. I do my physio, I go on walks. I’m lucky. But there is a dread that I’ll pick something up wrong or fall down some stairs and end up back at square one.

We have no news on the status of Maglione’s backpain. He clearly knew the McGill Big 3, and he hopped on a Citibike pretty quick to flee the crimescene. But he was staring down the recurrence just as I am, but with a lifetime of catastrophic debt on top. That I can’t imagine. The diagnosis and surgery ruining his life before it really began. He’s 26, I’m 27. We are vastly different people, his family are wealthy business owners, I’m an orphan from a council estate. But out of the two of us, I’m the one with the privilege to write a comedy show and he’s the one with nothing to lose by making a hit for the class war. ALLEGEDLY.

I’m not sure what to do with this. The parallels are weird- funny and horrifying, as the people in my inbox keep pointing out. ‘It’s so weird the CEO killer is also a McGill-head?!’

Do I put this in the show? ‘oooo you’re lucky I have socialised healthcare otherwise I’d be motivated to do a murder instead of standup” seems crass. Or, like the Chappel Roan soundbite I’m considering putting in, is it even a reference people will remember by the time the Edinburgh Festival comes around in August? And a man is dead, through all of this.

I conceived Spine Hygiene drunk on the previously mentioned Whole Bottle Of Wine (a gift from Quantum Leopard for performing on my birthday), laying on my sofa as the Nottingham Comedy Festival submission deadline was half an hour away. I thought ‘I’ll make something of this, something silly’. I was obsessed with Stuart McGill’s videos and kept making jokes through the pain to my girlfriend, noting the weirdness of life now my mobility was so reduced. I would spin this shit into gold, and it would be silly. Initially I was just going to do my physio exercises in drag as Stuart McGill with his lectures on in the background. One and done, a silly show in an uncertain time.

We live in uncertain times. Backpain is a symptom of injury, not just to the spine or kidneys or abdominal muscles. People being forced to live with pain when we have the means to treat it is an injury- whether that’s suffering on an understaffed, underfunded NHS waiting list or signing up for a lifetime of debt across the pond. I don’t think my comedy show will change that half as much as three bullets will**. I’d never considered this show for activism. But if the personal is universal, then I will be The Back Pain Girl.

**unless I get, like, a tour. A big tour. Or go viral on tiktok

Spinegiene Sheffield small postamble

Sheffield was really interesting, I got a bit cocky so I hadn’t rehearsed as much as I should have done, but the actual material was stronger, and the new jokes I included mostly paid off and will stay in. Big points to work on are connective tissue (lol), and making the themes of “It’s Not Supposed to Hurt vs. You Deserve Your Back Pain” more cohesive throughout.

There’s also the question of the above essay, which is going to be a Future Katie Problem I think. Gonna focus on what I have. The Sheffield post-show analysis is my most detailed and that’s on the paid version, a good time to get in on the Substack and supporting my work. Thank you x

Upcoming Shows:

• Spine Hygiene, Aces and Eights, London, Tuesday 14th January, time tbc

• Spine Hygiene, Leicester Comedy Festival, 16th February
  17:00, Phoenix- The Nest - this show is right before Club Wormhole so do see both together for an incredibly silly Sunday Night TICKETS

• Spine Hygiene, Saturday 15th March - 7pm-8.30pm, Glasgow Comedy Festival.
  Check my linktr.ee when tickets go live

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Knitting Update!

I’m just in hot girl sock mode, finishing things before the Christmas period when I’ll cast on something big.

I have a self-sustaining sock system.

• If I make a sock all in one colour, I need approx 30g of yarn

• Yarn generally comes in 100g balls

• That’s three socks per ball aka oh no!

• So I so the toe, heel and cuff in a different colour to stretch the colour as far as I can.

• When I buy a ball of sock yarn, I wind it into 4x25g balls and knit them toe up, with toe/heel/cuff contrast, using every scrap of the usually expensive yarn.

• I have a tiny 25cm/2.5mm circular knitting needle exclusively for socks. It’s ridiculous and I love it.

I feel like sock knitting is the sourdough bread of knitting. It’s it’s own weird subculture that you need specific equipment and time for, but once you’ve got a system it almost runs itself.