If you could return, don't let it burn, don't let it fade.

I don't know what to say today. Yesterday was a bad day, and I'm hoping today is better. I just feel like I'm floundering. One day, my neck feels good, loose with no headache, and the next morning I wake up with a pulsing headache that makes even tasting food unpleasant. Then the next day, I wake up and there seems to be no pain, though my range of motion is limited. It seems to baffle me completely.

I also get very frustrated when I ask questions of the experts and they either deflect any type of answer or, worse, turn into themselves. I asked the physical therapist about why I have such crepitus in my neck (the crackling, popping sound when I rotate my neck 360 degrees.) I never had it in my neck before and it annoyed me that I have it now. I was hoping that she could nicely explain why I had it now and then tell me how it will just get better and I won’t have to worry about it after everything is healed.

But she didn’t. She said “I don’t know why it happens. My neck has the same thing sometimes.” Alright sister, I am paying you to think about me, not you. I want you to think about it and make a relatively intelligent response. If you don’t know what crepitus is, then you shouldn’t by rendering physical therapy to me. Crepitus is a simple concept, and it usually can be helped by physical therapy. If you don’t know what it is, get out of the business.

She, as seems to happen so many times, turned it into something about her. I don’t give a flying fuck if your whole body creeks when you crawl out of your hovel every morning: I care about my neck, which rarely ever had crepitus in the past, now popping & crackling like a can of cola poured over top of a bag of popcorn in the microwave every time I look to my left or right. And it isn't just a pop or two, it is a lot of popping/crackling going on up there. And I want to know if it will be going away sometime or if I am stuck with this for the rest of my life.

So we do the heating pad and electro-stimulation. That goes well and feels good most of the time (there are times when it makes my shoulder muscle seize up for a few seconds, but overall it is great.) We get into the cervical traction device [see right]. You put your neck in the middle of these two padded prongs on a board that they tighten so they are snug on either side of your neck. This board that the padded prongs are attached to is then hooked up by a cable to a machine that pulls the exact amount of weight to stretch your neck upwards.

Every time I’ve had this traction, the physical therapist puts a towel over the prongs so that my naked neck isn’t going directly on the board. This different PT tells me to put my head down, and when I ask for a towel, she says I don’t need one. When I say that I’d like one, she makes a face and stands there. I so wanted to scream “GET ME A FUCKING TOWEL!” but I decide to work this starting contest. After about 15 seconds, she sighs, fucking SIGHS, and then gets the towel.

Unfortunately that seems to ruin my ability to relax enough to get out of the traction what I should get. I was all tense and angry. But I had 20 minutes to think about it, and I think I was being too harsh. If I’d only had this new therapist and not the other one, I’d have never thought that a towel was needed (although I’d have been a little sketched out about putting my neck where others had put theirs, and based on the clientele that I’ve seen there, it would have been old, flabby, sweaty, liver spotted necks that would have been there before me.)

So now I’m sitting here, the next morning, feeling somewhat guilty at having been confrontational with the physical therapist, as after she would answer my initial question about crepitus, I think I just wrote her off, and anything she said I probably responded with just a little bit of attitude. I should have just let it go and asked my physician when I see him later this month after PT is done.

I got another PT session on Friday morning. I just want them to tell me I’m better so that I can run again. I don’t know why I think it is a panacea, but I want to run so bad. And even when I walk on the treadmill, I can feel it in my neck. I can’t imagine what would happen if I ran full out. And I've got softball starting up in 3 1/2 weeks. I need to defend my MVP status.

But I didn’t use the word “fuck” out loud towards her, and I dropped the f-bombs at work yesterday regularly, so that was a small victory. Yeah me!