A very good idea

I've had nagging shoulder pain for going on seven months now, dating back to when I played softball this summer. So I've been thinking about physical therapy a lot, but only in a vague way, like, "Gee, I really should go get this dealt with sometime in the indeterminate future." I don't know why seven months of pain is preferable to just doing the few simple things that start the Ball of Complete Cure rolling, but there it is. In fact, when I mentioned my shoulder pain to my dad, he told me he's had a similar shoulder problem that's been bothering him for years, so I guess it's genetic (the stupidity, not the shoulder).

Anyway, it's a measure of how much my neck hurt yesterday that I actually faced my irrational fears of both the health insurance industry and the telephone and called a physical therapist. You remember Dan, the brutal but scarily effective PT, right? He said he wouldn't be surprised if my neck issue was related to my shoulder issue, but he didn't want to even touch the shoulder until we'd dealt with the immediate problem. Fine with me. My shoulder "pain" was a mosquito bite compared with what was happening in my neck.

He ran some kind of electrical current/therapeutic ultrasound through me to relax the muscles, did some manipulation and massage, taught me how to make a cervical collar out of a pillowcase, gave me a simple neck-turning exercise to do several times a day, and had me switch to a flatter pillow. Bam. I'm not completely cured yet (got another session later today), but I slept very well, I'm not on Advil anymore, and I'm functioning to the point of considering going to yoga—although I decided against it, because Not Being Stupid seems like something fun to try this week.