God, that was unpleasant. Back pain kept waking me up this morning and wouldn't settle until after I took a few Advil

It's not nearly as painful or crippling as last time, but it still sucks

I'm absolutely sure it came from carrying the fucking Christmas tree into the house

Had I carried it with two hands then maybe this wouldn't be an issue but since I also had to carry up KFC, I had to do it with one hand and I sure am feeling it

I'd really rather not have it be a thing where I hurt my back around the holidays. Or at all, really

I'm fine and should be fine in about a week or so, but I'm gonna have to be careful to not make it worse

I might just hold on to that bottle of Advil to be safe

Heating pads! You wanna loosen up those muscles and coax blood into the vessels there to heal any damaged tissue.

Right. I need to see if we have anything like that or if I need to improvise

There we go. Got a bottle full of hot water in a ziplock bag. Gonna try and have it on my back for a few hours

wet towels can work too

for the first day or two, you'll want to keep low activity, and have the heat on in a cycle of about 20min on, 20min off

as you feel muscles gently start to loosen, stretch a little in between cycles of heat, and grab an ice pack to use after the stretching to help ease the sore muscles

I tend to do that stretching bit during/right after a hot shower, it feels really nice

and remember light stretching, just enough to feel the muscles getting there

sounds like a plan

/salutes

part of my job is coaxing away back pain, so