Healed!

So, after 6 days of not doing any exercise except for some light yoga, and a weekend spent icing my back and popping Aleve, my spine issue is finally better. Just in time too, because 6 days felt like forever...that's practically like taking a week of vacation! (And I definitely noticed the effects of not doing anything when I jumped back into spin class this week!) I was able to see the nurse practitioner here at work a week ago (one of the benefits of having occupational health in the same department as the fitness center!), and she did a pretty thorough exam to immediately rule out any nerve issue. Whew! Since the pain wasn't radiating down through my leg, and I wasn't experiencing any numbness or tingling, it looked like a musculoskeletal problem. Also, the pain was very localized in the middle of my spine, not stronger on one side or the other, which would typically be the case with nerves. She said for whatever reason, I strained one of the tiny muscles/tendons/ligaments within the spine, and the area was just badly inflamed. I'm normally resistant to taking medication and try to find any other remedy first, but she kept stressing that I take an Aleve every 12 hours to clear it up. It worked, and by Tuesday of this week I was able to teach cycle again. I kept my workouts on the lighter side, but now by today, Friday, I feel ready to do almost anything!

It's still frustrating that I have no real clue as to how this happened in the first place! The only thing that could have possibly triggered pain was that the Thursday before this all happened, we did two 45-second rounds of boat pose (aka V-sit) in boot camp, which puts all the body weight on the very, very low spine and "sit" bones--a real ab challenge! Still, that's not an out of the ordinary exercise for me, and nobody else from that class had any pain...and I was sitting on a mat, not like it was directly on hard ground. The human body can be so weird sometimes! Just a lesson that you can never be too over-protective about your back.