Sometimes I can pop my upper back from a seated position by raising my hands above my head and rotating my torso with a particular style of torque. Did that on Monday, and as I did, my back popped, as did my shoulder, in a most unfortunate way.
That set off a sequence of painful sensations — sore shoulder, muscle spasms beneath and beside the scapula, pain across the collarbone and into the neck. Right in this area, which was on fire for a day and change:
More scapular stabilization dysfunction, then, and how did I walk around feeling like this for the second half of 2012 and almost all of 2013? (I’ve had one or two other re-occurrences and each time I’ve said the same thing. How did I suffer through this for that long? It only took three hospitals, three different surgeons and two different sets of physical therapy to make a collarbone tolerable.)
Anyway, at the office today I concentrated on some of those therapy exercises and I found an empty wall and did the tennis ball tricks. And then, walking down a ramp (it’s a quirky building) my neck popped and started feeling better.
I could feel it immediately, everything was starting to loosen up. My neck started popping at the slightest provocation. All of the muscles in my back, having flared for two days, felt better, but exhausted. I could move freely! But it also felt as if the slightest provocation could start the whole thing over again.
So naturally a three-and-a-half mile run was in order. Best I’ve felt in two days, somehow.
The moral to the story, I guess, is this: Never raise your hand.
I wasn’t even volunteering for anything at the time. And if volunteering requires any big arm movements right now, I probably would think twice about it.
Back to being the idea guy, then. I’m pretty good at that.
