Q-Tips: Enemy of Warrior 3

Yoga went much better today than normal.  In the past six months that I’ve been going to the Chiropractor regularly, I’ve recognized that I have one side of my spine and body that is much more flexible and strong than the other side.  That’s mainly because I have a tiny tad of scoliosis just above my sacrum.  I never guessed that clumsily leaping off a high jump mat and cracking my tailbone in the 5^th grade would echo into my 30’s. A valiant attempt to impress those 8th grade boys had become a miserable preadolescent fail.  

My main Yoga problem, however, is not my unbalanced strength and flexibility – it’s balance.  Warrior 3 is a joke for me – you want me to stand on how many feet?  Not all of them?  I’m quite sure that my instructor can feel my incredulous eyes boring a hole in the back of her head.  This whole issue, or so I thought, caused my right side balance to be much more stable than my left side balance on most days.  That is, until today. 

The past few weeks, I’ve been feeling sore in my left ear.  Saturday morning after my run, it started to get worse.  Monday I was fevered and the pain was beginning to diminish my appetite.  I noticed I could not walk a straight line down the hall.  Yesterday, I admitted to myself that I was fully into the 3^rd day of an ear splitting headache and was going downhill fast.  I left work early to go to the clinic.  After washing my ear, which felt like they were shooting a stream of water up into my eyeball with a stun gun, they made me lay on my side while they pulled out a piece of earwax larger than what should logically fit inside my tiny ear canal.  It was big.  And unnaturally gross.  It was a color that things that come out of your head should never be.  It was like a train wreck – I was utterly repulsed but I could not look away.  The culprit?  Q-tips.  The Dr. said that using Q-tips is like loading a musket with a tamping rod – it just shoves whatever is in the ear canal up against the ear drum.  Since I am a fan of really clean ears, it made sense, but I’m going to have to rethink my affection for the little white cotton covered tamping rods if this is the ultimate and super nasty conclusion of all things Q-tip.

 

After she removed the giantific ball of wax, I felt nauseous and the nurse had to hold me up because the room started spinning.  I recovered quickly, spent more than enough at the pharmacy for meds and went to bed early. This morning, after a massive dose of pain medication and my first round of eardrops since I was a baby, my Yoga practice was unfettered by any concern about my balance.  In fact, I’m wondering why I hadn’t decided to blame my ear wax for a less than stellar practice up to this point.  Warrior 3 was a one-footed miracle today – one that I don’t want Q-tips to ever steal from me again!

Potato chips are meaningless without Yoga (or…Love Letter to my Chiropractor)

Today is the first Friday of my new career.  I’ve been sitting in an office chair for the past four days.  For eight hours or more every day.  I also have not one, not two, but three twists in my spine in the distance from my pelvis to my ribcage – a fact recently provided to me by my Chiropractor.  Add this to an 11 degree curvature right to left in the lowermost vertebrae and I’ve got one messed up slinky trying to hold up my upper body. 

So yesterday I brought in my back supporter.  I thought it might make things better – it is a back supporter after all, although looks like a Pringle’s potato chip married a backpack and this thing is the ugly child.  It did help me a bit, and reminded me to sit up more, but I came home needing to lay on my back with my knees up to give my lower spine some breathing room.  The problem I anticipate today is that my poor slinky of a spine will begin hurting before I even get settled and started on programming statistical scripts that almost turned me into the Incredible Hulk yesterday.  My back really never quit hurting from yesterday.  And I took some heavy drugs, and used pain rub, and I’m currently using my TENS device – all of which should have relieved the pain independently, and have not relieved it as a trifecta.  Yikes!

Perhaps my Friday workout routine needs to include a little more Rag Doll, Triangle, Boat, and Twist.  In fact, this used to be my Wednesday routine to break up my strength and cardio cycle, and it didn’t hurt that Wednesdays were my Chiropractor day – he used to say that I always did much better on Wednesdays than any other day, Thank You, Slinky!  I’m all for natural pain remedies and prevention, and Thank You, Chiropractor, TENS company and all of my YouTube Yogis!  And here’s to no more three-pronged failed attempts at back pain relief in the future!