Actually, July has been a health and fitness adventure. Hopefully the fitness part will be a good thing in the long run, but for now, let’s just call it an adventure.
At the end of June, I decided to sign up for Wally World’s gym membership program. One of the gyms in this program is literally down the street from here. I can walk there from my house.
So I went and introduced myself to the manager/trainer and was actually starting to get the hang of going in and working out a bit.
Then I decided to get rid of the ugly volunteer pecan tree in my front yard. For those unaware of the term “volunteer” plant, this means that it grew unplanted by human hands. I’m pretty sure it was planted by a squirrel.
I left it for a while, wondering if it was ever going to become actually attractive, but it just stayed awful looking and started to kill the plants that were growing beneath it.
So, a week ago, I broke down and cut it down. This used a whole bunch of muscles that I’m not used to using, even in my fledgling workout schedule. Or so I thought.
Turns out I actually injured myself a bit. On Sunday, I went to work and whenever I had to sit down, like to take something off of a bottom shelf, I had just an awful pain in my back, and towards the end of the day, I coughed and gave myself a stabbing headache.
So, I rested on Monday and tried again on Tuesday, and found that my back still killed me when I bent over or sat down. So I called my telemedicine company and got a prescription for a muscle relaxant.
Both the doctor and my pharmacist said that the medicine would make me sleepy, so I should take it at night before bed. I was in such a hurry to get some relief, I took it at 9:30 that night and promptly discovered that I’m one of the minority of patients who get insomnia from this medication. I was up until the medicine wore off at 3:30 in the morning and then I was called in early on Wednesday.
I worked the early shift on Thursday, also, which did give me a chance to take the relaxant three times in one day. I tried to go to sleep an hour before the relaxant wears off, but just lay there awake, which is how I came to be posting this now. I still have half an hour before it wears off.
The good thing is that my back feels much, much better, even when I’m sleeping. It doesn’t hurt to sit down, and I may go back to my gym early next week. I’m afraid to go right now, since, well, my back.
My next relaxant dose will be at 9:30 in the morning, then 3:30 in the afternoon, then we’ll see how I feel about trying another one at 9:30 at night.
Time for a Gratuitous Amazon Link. Today we have Mexican Gothic, by Silvia Moreno-Garcia. This is one of my favorite selections from the book club I joined last year. Our heroine, Noemi, gets a letter from her cousin begging her to come to where the cousin is living with her new husband to save her from some unspecified danger.
Mexican Gothic is based on the old formula for gothic novels from back in the day. Young woman moves to creepy old building, meets two men of near her own age, one of whom turns out to be creepy and dangerous and one is helpful, and the heroine has to sort out what’s going on with the house and which of the two men is really the dangerous one.
This is one of my favorite stories and I’ve taken a couple of stabs at writing gothic novels myself. Maybe I’ll dig one of those old manuscripts out and work on it for a while. Later. My typing has been going steadily downhill this whole time and I don’t think I can cope with it much longer.