muscles are the worst.

Monday has rolled around again.

When I woke up this morning, I felt a familiar tightness at the base of my spine.  I have occasionally been prone to varying degrees of lower back pain, and this is one that I’ve had maybe two times before.

My walk in was a little bit uncomfortable.  I tried to think about relaxing my muscles.  I swung my arms lightly.   I tried to stand straight up, and when I made it to my desk, I attempted to use my chair as a back-cracking aide.  An adjustment, if you will.  I twisted my body and felt a few unsatisfying little pops.

I slid down in my chair, inching my hips forward, and felt some pretty incredible pain.  I couldn’t get that magical crack at the bottom of my spine, and what’s more, I was in some considerable pain.  When 11:30 rolled around, I headed down to Andy’s class with my compatriots, because he was scheduled to cover protecting groups today.

He did cover protecting groups, and the class was more or less unremarkable.  But my walk to class was exquisitely painful as I fought to stand upright and relax my muscles, feeling like my spine was bound up in muscles that just didn’t want to quit.  Everything seemed like it was squeezing painfully, and standing upright made me feel like I had a pronounced arch to my back, like my shoulders were way out in front of my feet.

They weren’t, but it sure felt that way.

I sat uncomfortably in class for the 90 minutes that it took, and then I walked with Denise to the food carts, straight from class.  I picked up tacos over rice and black beans, and we walked back up.  The walk itself seemed to do me a little bit of good, but I still couldn’t get my muscles to relax.  I am wondering if the muscles that I have desperately been trying to speak with today are not muscles that I normally speak to.  Maybe they’re muscles that are just there, maintaining things involuntarily until suddenly they’re not, and I don’t know how or why it went wrong!

I didn’t do anything particularly strenuous over the weekend, nothing that would have let the muscles exit the matrix, so to speak.

When I got back to the office, I asked Kate if I could borrow her massage chair.  She has one of those chairs that you set on another chair and then it just absolutely destroys all of your muscles when you turn it on, with that rotating motion and unforgiving bearings.  It also has a heat function, so that’s nice.

I set it on the lower back setting and turned the heat on, and while it was mostly a little bit too high, it seemed to have helped.  I could stand and walk with slightly less difficulty.

There was another faculty candidate giving seminar today, and I sat through that, feeling the heat seep back out of my muscles and having a fairly discomfort-free (can’t call it comfortable) position.  I managed the walk back to my office, still feeling like I was walking terribly oddly (I wasn’t), and sat back down.

Turned the massage chair back on.

Ow, man.  I think a few hours of massage action may have bruised some things.  My back seems terribly offended.

Maybe I’ll see if Yale insurance covers chiropractics.