Your employee handbook describes a brief section on disability and says the Medical Department determines whether an individual is considered disabled or not. The legal difficulty is when you are not always disabled (healthy). A discussion with the medical department should be able to place limits on your activities based upon doctor's recommendations or past absences.

There are three things I have found worthwhile to remember in preventing future back injuries and some exercises to maintain strength and flexibility. The exercises are shown in the attached pages and should be done every day for maximum effect. It's too late to do them when you're injured.

First is movement. When you do your exercises or pick up something, do it slowly. Moving slowly gives your muscles time to adjust and bear the load, assuming they are strong enough. Doing sit-ups should be done with knees bent and slowly- in repetitions of 5 and holding the last one for 10-15 seconds. Fast sit-ups can actually do more damage than good and anything over a foot or so is excessive vertical movement. Golf can be bad because of the rapid twisting and swinging, so it is one of my forbidden sports.

Third is stress. From my experience, psychological and work-pressure stress greatly predisposes one to back spasms. it is what is called a "trigger". As an illustration, last July 3, as I was bending over to tie up my running shoes for a training run, I had an intense back spasm, which disabled me for over 4 weeks. Was it the bending? I think it was the combined stress of two approaching conferences. So we need to monitor our stress and get away when it is building up. The running club had\a speaker come in to talk on back problems from a local hospital "back school". Out of 82 members, we had 19 people with back problems and two were forced to quit running. That was in 1983 and we had 60 people in attendance. The meeting lasted 90 minutes and we had to stop the questions to let the speaker go.