Three weeks of chronic pain have rendered me a shell of a person in survival mode. It's vicious because being in pain makes me tired, so I don't get the chance to recover. I really need a month's sabbatical from everything so that I can recharge.

I kept begging my PT for more electrical stimulation on the problematic muscles in my neck, the anterior scalene and the sternocleidomastoid (SCM). The first PT I went to started working on the levator scapula despite my consistent urgings to please work on the SCM because it is the real problem. At the end of the visit, that PT told me that they weren't allowed to work on the muscles of the neck. WTF? There is no reason for me to go to a PT who won't help me.

So I went to a new PT. She let the electro-stim machine shock the living daylights out of my right SCM. That provided significant benefit, so now I have a portable TENS machine to shock the hell of of the SCM whenever I want to. I have to use restraint, though, since I am so pissed off at the muscle that I considered requesting that it be surgically removed from my neck. If an appendix goes bad, we take it out. So why not a muscle? I betcha if it were removed from my body, it would be like an octopus and continue to spasm for the next three days.