STFAH: June 14, 2020

So I've been having problems sleeping lately. I've had a lot of neck, back, and arm pain, and what feels like muscle weakness and it's been keeping me up at night and waking me up in the middle of the night or early in the morning and I can't get back to sleep. I'm exhausted and really drained right now, and it was making me feel a little panicky because the pain feels out of control. While I still think part of it is the pillow situation, and I am working on that, I finally started googling what else could be happening, and it turns out that sitting around my house for the last three months during this pandemic, recovering from a sprained ankle, and doing very little in the way of exercising has caused my muscles to actually start atrophying. I'm feeling weakness because I literally cannot lift and carry what I used to be able to. And then I started back in at work a couple weeks ago and am carrying stuff on the walk to/from the bus and it's in a bag carried over one shoulder, not a backpack over both my shoulders. So when I realized that could be what was happening, I was able to define the pain better. It feels like after you strain your muscles when you work in the garden all day or after you lift a bunch of boxes, etc. As painful as it will be for a while, I have to come up with a better routine and start doing more exercising than I have been doing. My foot and knees are recovered enough that I think I can start using the treadmill which allows me to go faster in a more controlled manner than my outside walks.

I made a list of stuff to add to my routine based on days I go to work and days I don't. I'm hopeful that I'll start seeing an improvement soon. I guess I shouldn't be shocked by this, but I didn't see how bad I was getting until it was out of control. None of us has lived through a pandemic before, so it's not easy to know what you need to do. I'm going to take some ibuprofen tonight before bed and hopefully I'll sleep through the night. I go into the office tomorrow so I would like to be rested!

Charmed reruns, sudoku puzzles, taking out compost/garbage, doing the laundry, and making a homemade pizza filled out the rest of my day.