a pain in the neck.

monday night i must have slept on my neck wrong. i woke up tuesday morning thinking my neck was a bit sore. on the way back to work from lunch my neck starting really hurting badly. i guess i pinched a nerve. the rest of the day at work it hurt to move anything, especially my neck. it was a constant sharp pain right at the base of my neck, with more pain shooting up my neck to the base of my head and through each shoulder blade and out to my upper arms. not fun. i took 3 advil but that didn’t seem to help, so about an hour later i took 2 quick-release tylenol. that helped pretty quickly, but it also made me feel lightheaded and somewhat out of it. i’m not sure if it was just the acetaminophen, or the mixture of ibuprofen and acetaminophen. i usually take half the recommended dosage, but i wasn’t feeling like passing on any possible pain relief. it was kind of weird being at work and feeling like i needed to pay closer attention to what i was about to say and do so i wouldn’t say or do something i’d quickly realize i shouldn’t have. i think i managed to control myself pretty well. that said, someone gave me a 10mg vicodin for me to take later.
i went home, where i planned to spend a quiet evening doing as little movement as possible, but then sue called me and said their friend rich murphy was in town and was probably going to be calling me about hanging out (since jack and sue and family were out of town). he is in town for a friend’s wedding (cliff from the huntington’s evidently moved here and is marrying a Texas girl). rich did indeed call, and with the pain being lessened with more doses of tylenol, i decided having the opportunity to do stuff with rich was better then sitting at home. i drove to the potts’ house and picked him up, then we headed to the house of pies where i convinced him to get the patty melt. after that, we headed to the west alabama ice house. we stayed there until they closed, then i drove him home. i contemplated the vicodin, but having had a beer and recently experienced the lightheadedness from the possible mixing of drugs, i decided to pass.
wednesday i slept in, rotating my body 90 degrees every time i woke up (which was often) so i would hopefully not sleep in the same position again for a long time and make the situation worse. i did manage to get about 10 hours of rolling sleep though. i went into work after lunch. after work i did the radio show. (see the simpson version of me peter did here. why am i the only one that looks mad? maybe it’s because i didn’t cover my face in time.) after work i headed home and took half of the vicodin (5mg is the standard dose). vicodin is hydrocodone and acetaminophen. it made me feel lightheaded like the quick-release tylenol (or the tylenol/advil cocktail), but it did absolutely nothing for the pain. vicodin did nothing for the pain when i had my wisdom teeth pulled either though, so maybe my body ain’t hip to the vicodin trip. however, when i went to bed about two hours after taking it, i did have some interesting neon lightshows with my eyes closed, then heard a few things i know weren’t real. not sure if that ties to being tired, or what. but before long i was out and asleep.
by thursday, the pain was constant but not sharp at the base of my neck, and a ring of pain had traveled down my spine to the middle of my back and into my arms. i sort of equated it to the visual of a star going supernova, exploding, then dieing out in the center as clouds of gas went shooting out in all directions. thursday evening i had just finished eating a couple of corn dogs at james coney island, when i got a call from rich. he was about to eat supper at doneraki’s. i joined him, and had a strawberry margarita. we then headed to brasil, where we hung out and listened to a band play part of the time, and i had a coffee. we talked about lots of things. we both have oddly similar wide tastes in music. since he’s from the del-mar-va area and runs/ran in some of the same circles tamara did, it was kind of weird talking about some of that (people, places, bands, etc). most of those memories had been collecting cobwebs in my head. we left around the time they were closing, and i headed home.
today the pain was mostly tolerable. no sharp pain, and only moderate pain when moving my neck. the extremities showed more of a dull ache of muscle soreness than pain. hopefully within a couple more days, things will be back to normal.