Back to lifting

Went to see my Orthopedic specialist on Tuesday for my 3 month check in and received, as I expected, good news.  Well, actually it was good and bad.  My back is a good as it's going to get, that's the good part.  I can once again lift 5 gallon buckets of paint that's the bad.  Why is it bad?  Because now I can open the store since that's when most of our 5 gallon buckets are sold.  That means getting up at 3:30 in the morning, something the dogs never get used to doing.
And there is always the possibility that the remaining discs between L1 and L2 will once again squirt out their jelly.
This is what my back now looks like.

If you blow up the picture you can see that the disc between L4 and L5 no longer exists, and that those vertebrae have fused together.  The same thing is happening between L3 and L4, in fact the fusion between those vertebrae is almost complete.  These fusions limit my ability to twist and turn and bend, to some extent - solid bone does none of those things.  At some point all that bone growth will need to be removed if I want to be able to walk.  Hopefully it will be years from now.