Sit as upright as you can, with your spine straight, not leaning against the back of the chair, and your head balanced looking directly in front of you.
Then get as drunk as a lord.
Kaiser Permanente's exercises worked pretty well for me.
Muscle relaxants are your friends.
Check your workplace ergonomics. Chair and monitor at the right height? Proper headset or speakerphone in place so you don't have to cradle the telephone receiver?
Also, 4.
Ordinarily I am not big on massages, mostly because I am very ticklish. My neck was so stiff yesterday that I stopped at one of those seated chair massage places at the airport and got an express neck massage. Best $20 I've spent in a long time.
I usually do the same until I finally take an ibuprofen. An hour later, all better. Might need one the next day. Generally, the sooner I take it the better.
I'm not big on massages because I think it's much more fun to troll the 'tariat with the notion that they're complete bullshit.
Aleve. It works wonders for me. I consume dangerous amounts of it for my back and neck, for cricks, aches, and spasms. It's a fucking miracle drug.
Ibuprofen is actually my drug of choice for this sort of thing, and usually works wonders, but is verboten at the moment.
I got a 45 minute massage the other day but not to release the toxins or increase the flow of qi or anything. I just like having someone squish my back around.
I don't get cricks in my neck often, but I have found that I can reliably get a very satisfying pop out of it by jerking my head just so. At this point I can crack every bit of connective tissue in my body, including around my sternum.
Do you use "crick" to mean spasm, or pain more generally? I don't use the word and had to look it up, but a spasm is how I got my experience in 3. (Strained so hard to open a jar something snapped.)
Plug for Kaiser, they had an online decision tool that told me I could treat it myself without going to them.
I use it to mean a kink in your neck, from sleeping on it wrong or something. Probably a spasm?
I like 2 and 4 best, but in reality I deal with it Eggplant-style.
Do you use "crick" to mean spasm, or pain more generally?
No, it's a stream or small river.
Aleve. . . . It's a fucking miracle drug.
Hoo boy, not if you're on the depression cocktail I'm on. I don't know which of my meds it interacted with, but it made me dizzy and nauseated and generally crazy feeling for a day.
No, it's a stream or small river.
In your neck. It happens.
To the OP: Tennis balls.
To get at knots in your neck, instead of grabbing the knot (except don't you also not believe in muscle knots?) and moving it around, you can just hold the tennis ball and lean your weight on it at different angles.
Protip: To get to spots on your back that are hard to reach, put a tennis ball in a long sock and dangle it over your shoulder, if you see what I mean. To cover larger areas, put in two tennis balls.
Warmth and ibuprofen (if you can tolerate it). Plus gentle movements and some massage. The tennis ball thing is good.
My neck was so stiff yesterday that I stopped at one of those seated chair massage places at the airport and got an express neck massage. Best $20 I've spent in a long time.
Airport chair massages have been a godsend for me so many times.
In grad school, my best friend and I used to refer to a specific condition as "Hegel neck," as we both got cricks in our neck that were so bad that we couldn't look over our shoulders without a ton of pain at the same time we were making our way through reading a lot of Hegel.
Then I paid $5 in student fees.
(except don't you also not believe in muscle knots?)
Barely. I barely believe that there is an actual thing called a knotted muscle, once you clear away the vast masseuse conspiracy. Now, does massage to anything to address a spasming, knotted muscle? Ask the mullahs.
19: If Aleve messed with my cocktail I'd go even crazier than I am. I think the prescription horse pills I sometimes take as a muscle relaxant might be interacting because they put me to sleep better than Ambien does.
I used to mess up my neck a lot. What has worked for me is something along the lines of 2 (basically, imagining that a string extending from the top of your head is pulled upward, gradually straighten your neck, and roll your shoulders slightly back in their sockets so that they are parallel to the ground and perpendicular to your spine, rather than rolled forward or pushed back). Hot compresses are very useful for relaxing your neck muscles in the moment. Also, one of those ugly scoop-shaped tempurpedic foam pillows.
I now find myself wanting to call the Kaiser Permanente advice nurse and say: "I can't feel my legs, Kaiser."
||
May I take the most self-centered view possible on a real tragedy? I just don't feel okay expressing this elsewhere.
Jammie's aunt was just diagnosed with stage 4 cancer. Which is super awful and obviously the real tragedy. So my mother in law is not coming down for spring break anymore, she's going to be with her sister.
Which I TOTALLY get, I'm really not pathological. I'm just massively unenthusiastic about spring break now. Me, the kids, and my embarrassing painful condition, home together all week long. aAAaaaaaauuuuggghhh.
|>
Sorry all. I even feel like an asshole just writing that out.
Heebie, I don't think you're being an asshole to be frustrated by things that inconvenience you, especially when significantly pregnant. You seem pleny aware of why it's the right choice, whicis more than your brothers' wives could probably manage. Now I am being a miserable asshole tonight, but I'm not going to bother sharing the boring details. Just know you're only ungogged's second greatest monster at the moment.
Q: Why did the chicken cross the road?
A: Because Higgs boson!
Just know you're only ungogged's second greatest monster at the moment.
And all-time, you're third or fourth, tops.
Seriously, though, Thorn is right that being frustrated about this is perfectly understandable. I think one of the huge virtues of Unfogged is that it's a venue where people can be more honest about things that reflect poorly on them than they can in real life, but where we also know each other well enough to be understanding when people admit to such things.
(Yes, I realize that I've probably gone well beyond the limits of prudence in this sort of admission in the recent past. I did immensely appreciate the level of understanding I still got, though.)
33: It's kind of like finding a five-dollar bill and then telling a reporter "I'm pretty sure I found a five-dollar bill; I did lots of checks; but I can't completely rule out that I what I found was actually the Pope, dressed up in a really convincing five-dollar bill suit".
39: joke's on you; there is no pope!
There is no pope but poop, and Sifu is its prophet.
A Higgs boson walks into a bar. Bartender says, "Holy shit!"
39: Ah, I thought it was Sean Carroll's impossibly fatuous quote at the end.
Do they not know the spin yet? I assume there are other reasons gravitons have been ruled out.
There's no pope because CERN annihilated it with antipope.
The spin is zero. This has been obvious for the better part of a year because it's the only thing that makes any goddamn sense[*]. But if you throw everything we know about quantum field theory[**] out the window and insist on directly measuring the spin instead of inferring it from all the information available, I guess the statistical evidence for spin-0 versus spin-2 isn't overwhelming.
And the graviton is massless and very very weakly interacting. They don't mean "graviton", they mean "composite spin-2 particle". Which people sometimes call a "Rand/all-Sun/drum graviton", despite the existence of strong arguments that this isn't a reasonable thing to think about.
[*] Depending on how good the microphones in the room were there might be audio somewhere on the web of me totally losing my patience with people about this at a conference back in December when I decided to show up for one session despite running a high fever.
[**] For values of "we" that may not be as large as I would have thought, given how many people keep talking about this.
45: agreed. Reading that made me think I should let Halford off the leash and allow him to eat the guy.
I hear Barack Obama is writing a book about this very moment in history. Working title: The Odd Paucity of Pope.
Lead author: "It looks like the Higgs boson."
Co-author 1: "It smells like the Higgs boson."
Co-author 2: "It feels like the Higgs boson."
Co-author 3: "It tastes like the Higgs boson."
Peer Reviewer: "Good thing they didn't step in it!"
Later researchers: "Sorry we took so long to reproduce the results. We collided a lot as kids."
I don't understand how a person's mind can work like that, Stanley. I'm not judging, I just don't get it. Other forms of humor and wordplay, including forms that are utterly beyond my rather limited capabilities, still make some sense to me. But not punning. Please explain yourself and your kind.
Co-author 4: "The fonts are all wrong!"
Co-author 5: "Said the actress to the bishop."
Co-author 6: "If I'd known it was going to be that sort of paper..."
Co-author 7: "You don't discover Higgs boson; Higgs boson discovers you."
Thanks, Teo and Thorn. It is nice to be able to vent.
48: The spin is zero.
I'd say it's less than zero at this point -- just an irrelevant website dusted with traces of blow and broken dreams.
Furthermore: Which people sometimes call a "Rand/all-Sun/drum graviton"
a.k.a. Aqua-Buddha
I was wondering about masslessness. It seemed like that would be evident. At first glance I read those slashes as options. I like the All-Sun graviton but am not crazy about the Rand one.
Is this the pope thread? Last night I dreamed that Mrs. K-sky was made pope. "They said I was very wise," she explained. It was a very vivid dream -- there was white smoke and everything -- and I had lots of questions, like whether this automatically meant that she would allow the ordination of female priests, what this would mean for our relationship, etc. Ratzinger was there, but not being pope anymore made him look about sixty years younger.
Then I dreamed that my sister got a tattoo on her face based on an art film we'd supposedly once seen called Black Cat. When I told her that everyone who tattoos their face eventually goes crazy, she revealed it was just makeup and wiped it off.
(As I believe that narrating dreams is a social crime on par with telling people how their deceased family members inconvenience you, I do appreciate the forum.)
Do we even need a pope now that we have the Higgs Boson?
Maybe that's why Benedict abdicated.
Crick this, Crick that. What about Rosalind Franklin?
Or Watson, for that matter, but he's overrated anyway.
63:
"If the Pope's head happened to come off one day, and someone was standing nearby, would they make him the new Pope?"
"I don't think that's the way it works."
"What about the Chief Rabbi?"
"Same thing, I'm afraid."
I cannot remember where this conversation comes from.
A quick search did not help, but apparently a 'pope's head' is "a long-handled brush usu. used for dusting ceilings or washing windows."
I'm not coming up with any likely etymology.
I did learn that it makes a big difference whether the crick is a tight muscle or a pinched nerve. Massage and heat, while great for the former, are not good at all for the latter.
Wow, I guess this is a blog by academics. I had PT for neck pain (crick? spasm? cramp?) so bad I literally couldn't move for three hours while waiting for the ibuprofen to kick in long enough to make it to the hot shower. Apparently, my anti-depressant cocktail doesn't allow for muscle relaxers :/
Anyways, beyond drugs, I found a hot water bottle on my neck every night helped, and the PT showed me an exercise where sit/stand up very straight and then pull your chin into your neck (try to give yourself a double chin) for 10 seconds, and then repeat 10 times. I found it helps.