Back in early November, more than 3 months ago, I started having a sharp pain in my right center rectus abdominis (that’s the 6-pack abs). It only hurt when I moved a certain way, and to call it a pain is overstating the case — it was really just an irritation. But it was there.
I looked around the internet and diagnosed the pain as a pulled ab, not a hernia. I had recently done an abdominal routine that I had not done in a while, and I did it without warming up. On top of that, I really pushed it. That was dumb, but hindsight is 20/20, so there ya go. Won’t do that again.
Well, I didn’t do that again, but i did something.
Not sure what it was, but I started having an even sharper pain in that same spot of my rectus abdominis. Again, it was simply an annoyance, but I could feel it more intensely and more often than I had before.
I thought, “I’ve done it this time!”
However, my range of motion was still not affected. While I felt some discomfort, it wasn’t the type of pain that I associate with a severe injury, so I planned to do what I always do in that case — just work through it.
Fast forward to Tuesday, when I woke up with a terrible headache. Finally, that afternoon, I decided to take 600mg of ibuprofen. I don’t like to ingest drugs of any sort — okay, outside caffeine and alcohol — but I felt it was warranted here.
The headache soon went away, and I also noticed the pain in my abs had subsided.
When I woke up the next day, the pain in my abs, which I normally felt strongly as I got out of bed, was gone!
I did some googling and consulted my friend Donna, who has some expertise in the area, and concluded that I’d had a muscle spasm in my rectus abdominis. The ibuprofen must have calmed it.
This makes me rethink my attitude toward ibuprofen.
I don’t want to make it a part of my daily diet, because I can live with sore muscles, but it does seem a bit absurd to allow muscles to continue spasming when a small dose of a fairly innocuous drug will calm them.
Live and learn.