Herniated Cervical Disc: Progress Report

Earlier in this year I mentioned getting cervical herniated disc (c6-c7). It was quite a traumatic and disheartening experience to suddenly have my hand swelling up to Hulk-like proportions, my arm feeling like it's asleep all the time, and having these bulbous muscle knots throughout the affected area - underarm, shoulder blade and upper back. But under the circumstances with what I'm about to mention below, it should've been entirely expected, especially considering my increasing age. I was doing all the wrong things. Here are a list of terrible things I did that everyone should avoid:

• Hauling heavy laundry, grocery and musical equipment to our 4th floor walk-up apt since 1998(!)
• Doing work until late at night in an uncomfortable position and ignoring the discomfort
• Doing 8 hours sitting at computer then more at home and piano practicing on top of that
• Maintaining bad posture both when typing and practicing
• Not exercising and stretching sufficiently
• Not eating right and drinking enough fluids
• Drinking alcohol a bit too much
• Not paying attention to chronic neck and shoulder tension
• Breathing shallowly
• Skipping lunches and not taking enough breaks
• Having a big Labrador pull me around too much

Is it any wonder that this happened? This was an eye-opener for me, I have always been blessed with incredibly good health and having little problems with aging. I got cocky I guess and all of these poor physical habits caught up to me.

For those of you who might be confused about how a pain in the cervical spine area can result in pain in the arm and other places, in a word, it can happen rather easily. The herniation results on pressure on the nerve that routes through that cervical area and that nerve pathway continues along the pathway to the shoulder, arm and specific fingers. See below diagram

*

And this is how the pain "refers" to other parts of the body: arm and fingers:

**

I will be talking about the therapy choices I took and where I'm at now in the next blog.


*The first animated gif is used courtesy of necksolutions.com
**the nerve diagram is courtesy of myopain.com