The pain seemed to tap me on the shoulder only lightly before it tiptoed over to my neck and tried to seize it.
Maybe I slept wrong. Or turned too quickly. Maybe my body finally needs the mythical eight glasses of water a day to keep all the toxins moving out and my muscles from drying up and turning to jerky.
At first, it felt like nothing more than a little pinch. It lasted for only a few seconds before it shifted sideways and then disappeared.
I wasn’t alarmed, but I was trying to find ways to adjust that didn’t really help.
Day by day, it got incrementally worse. By week’s end, I could concentrate on little else besides a single point, midway along the trapezius, where the pain had settled and sharpened as I stared into the computer screen for the forty-fifth hour. I could chase it: The pain would ebb as I leaned forward, and flow as I shifted my head back and sideways. But I couldn’t really contain it.
The Google Machine mocks my investigation. It scoffs at my thrice-weekly running argument and suggests that what I am experiencing is a flare-up between my ol’ friends, tension and stress, who had perched precariously atop the unmistakable evidence of an otherwise sedentary lifestyle.
I’ve gone through enough physical therapy with my children to know that the aches and pains of childhood aren’t always the “growing” kind. Often, they are the slouching kind, the sitting-too-long kind, or the dreaded head-hung-low-because-it’s angled-down-at-your-phone-too-long kind of discomfort, which feels like it may be here to stay since there is no way we can counteract the shapes our reliance on modern conveniences twists us into.
I tried everything: I tried to avoid looking down; I tried alternating heat and ice; I tried stretching and moving at a snail’s pace. I tried sleeping with a new pillow, and then no pillow, then positioning all the pillows in the house so that my shoulders arched backward.
I even tried forcing myself to relax … breathing in and out with slow, measured breaths, then willing my jaw to unclench and my shoulders to lower away from my ears.
Tricking myself into thinking that the combination had worked, and the pinch had smoothed itself out. I could walk and run. I could even carry heavy things while walking and running without much discomfort.
But the second I sat down, the pain climbed up my back as if it had been formally invited to play a game of chicken.
And that’s where I was, sitting at a picnic table, swapping stories of hardship with my perennially injured Saturday Run Club friends, when one of these intrepid athletes shared a sip of wisdom from her golden chalice.
“When you go home, lie down on your bed, gently lean back so your head is hanging off the edge, then ever-so-carefully lift your head and chest slightly as if you were attempting a sit-up. Just a few reps. Don’t overdo.”
I wasted no time. When I got home, I lay down on a chaise lounge and scooted to the edge until my head dipped backward. I let it hang for a minute before I gingerly lifted it up. I repeated the process three more times, letting a few hours pass before I performed another set.
I wasted even less time texting my friend, as the advice seemed to be working.
It wasn’t magic, but it felt miraculous. A few minutes a day was enough to keep the pinch at bay.
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