Throwing your back out is a miserable experience. And if you do it once, it is very easy to have it go out again. The first time you might be lifting a hide-a-bed sofa on a narrow staircase. The next time, you stoop to pick up socks on the floor. The results are the same. Bent over. Frozen. Miserable.

Another miserable experience? Raw sewage backing up through your drain and coating your laundry room floor.

Jess and Kev had that happen every so often over the course of a couple of years. Disgusting. They got plastic tubs to keep the dirty clothes off the floor in case of an unexpected eruption. They looked into getting the problem fixed. Apparently a drainage pipe carrying all the sewage out of the house had a crack in it. They had the rooter-dude come out with a special camera on the end of a long, stinky snake provide a sort of televised colonoscopy on their house. Sure enough, a small break in the pipe. Enough for paper and wot not to get stuck on it occasionally and dam up. Once the dam was in place, the flow of sewage would reverse and spout through the nearest drain, in the laundry room. Sometimes the pressure of the backup would break down the dam. Sometimes, Kev would have to call the rooter-dude to plow through it at one-fifty a pop.

“Now that we know what the problem is,” Kev asked the rooter-dude one day, “how much would it cost to fix it?”

The rooter-dude winced. That’s not a good sign. “See, the pipe is buried in your foundation,” the rooter-dude said, pointing at the recently bleached floor of the laundry room. “The good news is, it doesn’t run under the finished floor of your family room. The bad news is, the break is directly underneath your boiler.”

“So, you’d have to dig up our foundation?” Kev said, looking at the huge boiler that provided the efficient and clean baseboard heat in their home.

“And temporarily disconnect, move, and reconnect your boiler,” finished the rooter-dude.

“And that’s more than a hundred and fifty dollars?” Kev asked.

“I would estimate somewhere between nine and twelve thousand,” said the rooter-dude, flinching a little as though he feared Kev might actually punch him. Kev just stared at him. “And that sort of thing is not covered by insurance,” rooter-dude went on. “Cash payment.”

“Good to know,” Kev said.

“You don’t need to do it today,” rooter-dude said. “Maybe not for a year or two. But at some point, it will need to be fixed. So you should start saving now. Like for college. Or retirement.”

“But for sewage,” Kev said. The rooter-dude just shrugged and nodded.

The thing is, weeks, even months might pass between disasters and they would forget about it, as though if they never thought about it, it would never happen again. Hopeful amnesia. Naïve at best.

There was this tell-tale warning of an impending explosion. The water in the toilet and the shower drain in the bathroom just off the laundry room would suddenly gurgle away, like the tide being sucked out to sea just before the tsunami hits shore. Hearing that sound would often buy enough time to ensure any rugs or stray articles of clothing were clear before the brown ooze would pulsate from the tiny grid in the floor.

One morning, as Kev was lathering up in the shower, he heard the tell-tale gurgle. He stuck his head out of the shower in time to see the water unnaturally recede down the basin of the toilet. He shut off the shower and made a mad dash for the laundry room. As he suspected, a couple of sweaters and pants had come down from the laundry chute, but missed the plastic bins. He bent quickly, scooped the clothes to safety and…that’s when his back went out. As simple as that. Bent over. Frozen. Miserable.

And remember, Kev was just in the shower.

He had made the mad dash without so much as a towel. “Honey…” he cried out, hoping Jess would hear him and respond post haste. Their two daughters were also upstairs, getting ready for school. They did NOT need to see this. Ever. Kev called out to Jess again, using her name this time, as he wanted to ensure to all exactly for whom he was calling.

Kev tried to steady himself from falling over completely by holding on to one of the plastic laundry tubs. The act of raising his arm shot a bolt of pain from his spine down his leg, seizing muscles in a painful spasm like a giant rat-trap snapping on his lower back.

Jess arrived on the scene and found Kev hunched over in the laundry room, naked and dripping wet.

“Wh–what…?” she started.

“A towel!” Kev said, cutting her off. “Quickly! A towel!”

She ran to the bathroom and returned with the towel. Kev had not moved an inch.

“What…?” she tried again.

Kev delicately wrapped the towel about his waist and slowly pivoted, still full dripping hunch, to sort of face her. “My back went out,” he said. He could see from Jess’s reaction that that only explained a fraction of the questions going through her mind.

That’s when the floor drain erupted raw sewage.