My back is killing me

So sometime Monday I started experiencing this back pain. It’s not uncommon for me to have this pain; its been recurring off and on for the past several years. Sometimes I go a month or so between spells, other times it may be 4 months or more. Sometimes it just lasts for a day, other times for a week. There seems to be no rhyme or reason as to when I am afflicted with this. I can never figure out what causes it to go away either. All I know is that it hurts like hell. A sharp pain. It doesn’t feel like a regular sore back like when you lift something wrong. It feels like a pinched nerve, or at least what I imagine what a pinched nerve would feel like.

Normally the pain isn’t too bad, I can manage quite well with just ibuprofen or tylenol. However, Tuesday morning the pain was so bad I couldn’t get out of bed. So Tuesday afternoon I went to the doctor. The doctor prescribed cyclobenzaprine, which is a muscle relaxer. The thinking is, my muscles aren’t… relaxed? Anyways, I’ve been taking these pills pretty religiously for the past few days. It doesn’t really help the pain go away, but what I have noticed, is that it makes me REALLY sleepy! Basically, other than eating, drinking, and going to the bathroom, I slept all the way from Tuesday night until Friday morning. A very long sleep. However, the pain is not going away. In fact, if anything, it is getting worse.  I don’t really know what to do about it. I’ve been taking the muscle relaxers and alternating ibuprofen/tylenol. Nothing seems to help except to sleep. But I can’t just sleep the rest of the weekend, or the rest of my life. I have too many important things to do, I think.

Anyways, why am I up at 4:30 in the morning? Well, I just got off the phone with a friend a little bit ago. I was going to write about that, but I want to think it over first, so more on that later.