Sleep on the floor. Highly recommended.
I slept on the parquet floor last nite coz Dad said to sleep on a "hard surface". I swear, the floor did wonders for my back! I'm sooooooo much better today, I can hardly believe it. The pain is much reduced, life is back to normal...
When the backache struck yesterday, I was just thinking how much we tend to take for granted. Some years back, around 1999, I think, I woke up one day with this excruciating pain in my left breast. Further examination led to the discovery of an unmistakeable lump.
Of course the first thing that leapt into my panicked mind was CANCER. I tried telling myself I was too bloody young for breast cancer (21 years old!) and that nobody who had ever discovered a cancerous lump seemed to complain of accompanying pain. After all, if the lump is painful, you'll know it's there, right? -- since it's trumpeting its existence to your body in unmistakeable terms? Why then the need to do regular breast examinations??
The first people I called were my opthamologist uncle (Dad's brother) and his wife, a GP who's now a stay-at-home mom. After reassuring me that it was most unlikely to be cancer, they brought me to see a general surgeon. Diagnosis? Duct ectasia. Like, trust me to have some obscure medical condition nobody's ever heard about, eh?
Basically, one of the ducts in the breast got blocked and then got infected and I had an abscess inside the breast. Wah, no wonder so bloody painful lah! Good grief...
So I went on a course of antibiotics and the thing went away... then it came back and I went on another course of antibiotics and it went away... then it came back and I went on -- well, you can guess the rest. The surgeon didn't want to operate coz he said even with surgery, the stupid thing might still recur. Bleh.
About three or four recurrences later, the surgeon finally decided to operate. Minor surgery, of course, although I was under general anaesthetic. Didn't even get to stay a night in hospital :P
And if I remember correctly, the stupid thing did recur at least once after surgery. But finally it deigned to go away and life went back to normal.
When you come to think of it, the body's quite amazing. Every part, from the tiny cells to the major organs, just keeps plugging away, doing its own thing, and together, they form this efficient piece of machinery. Biology was never my favourite subject (did pretty badly in it during high school and promptly dropped the subject once I went to college) so I'm not quite sure how each of the various parts works (*grin*); I just know that it's all very intricate and a lot of tiny details must be in place for everything to work exactly the way it should.
It just doesn't seem particularly miraculous coz it's so... so... normal...