Aback
I’m still in the chair that I sat down in this morning at a place called work. So of course my neck and back hurt and ache. This morning I went to occupational therapy where I brought my temper-pedic pillow. I was prescribed to ice my neck when it hurts, in the past I was supposed to heat it. I’m taking a break from acupuncture cuz I probably “can’t” afford it. Day after tomorrow right after OT, with special tape on my neck and back I’ll go to the physiatrist who referred me to PT for eight weeks and now OT. Next stop could be an osteopathicist. I used to get massages. My PCP referred me to the physiatrist. The neurosurgeon said the erosion in my C3-C6 vertebrae weren’t symptomatic.
Right now my right neck hurts but usually it’s the left. A “tingling” “travels” down from the middle of my neck to my upper back, creating an intense muscular knot (or two, or ten) and if I do any exercise, attacks my left shoulder and upper left arm. All these pains and aggravations make me feel weak and stupid. My life runs me. My brain doesn’t listen. I think in stark.
Luckily I learned in OT that few patients regularly do their exercises at home. Before that I felt like an imbecile who didn’t deserve to be healthy because I rarely completed my homework exercises in any sort of remotely thorough way, if I did them at all. Along with my pillow, which doesn’t seem to be working thus far, I also bought a hard form roller that I’m supposed to lie on to straighten out my vertebrae and complete exercises upon.
My computer workstations are nightmarish. At work the table that I’m typing on now is too high, so I put my feet on a phone book. I’ve also been prescribed at different moments that chair arms are supportive and terrible.
Once, my chiropractor told me to set up my keyboard near my lap, my monitor straight ahead, and wait until my legs “kicked in” to decide the height of my chair. He even did a site visit and decided I had a good set up. This was at a previous job. You know how much the good set up decreased my tightness and pain. Not a’tall.
At home I have a laptop and a hard wooden chair. I think I am standing slightly taller these days (my back pain extends back to nearby a car accident when I was 11), but that’s a negative when I’m sitting in my chair at home because now I have to look even further down at usual and the pain comes quick. How did I make it through grad school like this? Y’know the cheapest chairs that back specialists recommend are $450 a piece and they don’t work very well on me either?
My grandmother had an extremely curved back at the end of her life. She went from 2 inches taller than my mother (her daughter-in-law) to 2 inches shorter than her. My dad had back surgery the month before I was born.
Along with acupuncture, another “treatment” that my poor school insurance does not pay for (at all—it barely pays for many of my other office visits) is yoga. Somehow yoga has control over my mind and the minds of most people around me. I don’t mean that disparagingly; it seems yoga has convinced more people I know of its importance that any other back treatment activity. So I pre-pay for a semester with a person who seems like a great teacher and I try to calm my mind for 1.5 hours almost every week. I don’t feel especially great afterward (as with EVERY other treatment I receive—I always figure out how best to lie to my medical professionals on the spot when they ask if I felt at all better after the last appointment), but somehow I know it’s good to do.
Also, I rarely exercise aerobically, I don’t eat “right,” and I spend too little time outside. That’s just the theme song of Somerville Vice.
But don’t worry, I’ll be back.
