For the past three days, I’ve had a very literal pain in my neck of mysterious origins. I’m not prone to random musculoskeletal pains, so I’ve been cranky about it, as well as contrite about all of the times that I’ve discounted Mr. P’s bodily creaks and twinges. I remember how he used to complain about upper-back pain on a near-daily basis for three months until I told him, “I don’t believe that your pain can be that bad, because anybody else with health insurance as good as yours would have been to see a doctor rather than endure the corporeal torment that you profess to be experiencing, my love.”
Mr. P now sees a chiropractor who has figured out a way to bill the insurance company for 30-minute massages, so he’s all set. “You should go to my chiropractor,” he says (which probably won’t happen because the one time that I went to get my back adjusted, I passed out on the floor like a sack of potatoes, stunning some poor Newbury Street chiropractor who probably thought he severed my brain stem.)
It hurts on the right side of my neck when I turn my head fully to the left, and it hurts on the right side of my neck when I turn my head fully to the right. As I sit at a computer all day long and really have no need to twist my neck to and fro, the pain mainly rears:
1- When I’m sleeping. Some nights, I slumber like a rock. Other night, I toss, turn, and wake up on my stomach with my arms and legs splayed like a weather vane.
2-When I drive. Since I compulsively check my blind spot, I am now experiencing searing neck pain every time I turn my head. Way to add injury to insult when I discover some loutish Jeep lurking in my rear quarter.
3-When I do yoga. Could this be how I injured myself in the first place? Ah, the irony of practicing these ancient gymnastics in a modern environment. I cannot stop the strive. I insist on deepening the spinal twist, on intensifying the backbend. I have but precious few minutes a week to practice yoga, and I make them count… until they don’t.
