July 17 - Bob hurt his neck in Leavenworth, Washington

I had noticed my neck was getting sore as we were reading together the previous evening and it continued to hurt whenever I turned over during the night, which plus the smoke drifting our way from the wildfires up the canyon made for a rather restless night. The neck pain was worse the next morning and I started to be really careful about how I held my head so that I would not get those sharp, lancing pains down the left side of my neck. After a very careful and quite slow eating of breakfast, we put the dulcimer and computers in the truck in case the wildfire would come down canyon and burn our trailer and headed off for the morning walk in the town of Dryden.

But the neck pain continued to worsen and when it came to the point that I was having blinding pain each time Monika accelerated or braked, I decided I just wasn't in any shape for the morning walk or the afternoon bike events. We turned around in Leavenworth and Monika prevailed on me to go to an emergency room and get checked out by a doctor. I felt so stupid saying, "My neck hurts" to a doctor and taking up a cot in the emergency room, but she was sympathetic and quickly determined that I was having a spasm of the left side trapezoid muscle, which is the muscle running up the neck that pulls the head around to the left side. She gave me two tablets of some muscle relaxant that had the side effect of knocking me out for the next four hours plus a prescription for generic pain reliever for the next 5 days. I spent the rest of the day on the bed with an ice pack on my neck, trying not to move my head at all.

But do you know how difficult it is not to move your head? So many things like checking the time, looking for where my glasses were, and so forth gave automatic "move head left" commands to that muscle, which instead of doing anything would just send burning, lancing pains up and down my neck. I tried very hard to avoid any automatic head movements, but as soon as I would relax my vigilance something was bound to attract my attention to the left side and then BAM I'd have the pain back. I finally found a way to lie on the sofa and prop my head against a wall so that the muscle didn't have to support it, and spent the rest of the afternoon religiously holding that position. At least I could hold the manuscript for Wanderung 5 up in front of me and edit it, which salvaged something from an otherwise eminently forgettable day. Monika put together some photo-montages from the Columbia River and the Olympic Peninsula that we printed out to write some more photo letters to the folks. When we finally went to bed that evening, I found a way to prop up my head with pillows so that we could read the Asaro book a bit more and see how the protagonist was doing. But when it finally came time to turn out the lights, I was really just glad to go to sleep and have the day of pain over with.