My new neck fusion.

Here's my new neck fusion, it goes all the way up, almost touches my skull bone.
Pretty wild eh?
I took this yesterday using my cellphone while at the surgeon's office.
I went in because I'm having a concern with how my head is positioned, instead of looking up and facing straight ahead, I'm looking down.
It may be super tight and stiff muscles, which is what I believe it is, or it could be that the last joint isn't strong enough to hold my head up.
I also believe that my brace is causing the extreme muscle stiffness.

I experimented on the way home, reclining the seat all the way back, seat belt on, and brace off, and just relaxed the entire way home home.
Mindy and I just chatted about movies, hot guys, hot chicks in movies, (neither of us think there's anything even remotely attractive about Angelina Jolie. Nada.) and just chilled all the way home.
By the time we got here, my muscles had relaxed, totally, I was able to put my head up.
I then put my brace back on to to be safe and walk back in the house.
In the less than 2 minutes it took, my neck had pinched and tightened back up, squishing my head down again.
It seems obvious to me that the brace is all wrong, causing my muscles to become hyper-reflexive, and then lock in position.
So, I'm leaving off the super hard, too-big-for-me-brace, and I'm going to call Walgreen's and see if they have any of the soft padded neck braces, just to wear for support.
But it's so super obvious to me that the current hard plastic brace is causing my muscles to tighten up and lock, so I'm going to use a soft brace for support, and just do a ton of relaxing. Me and my couch and movie collection, will be best of friends for the next few months.
I'm determined to let my muscles just relax and heal nicely, not fighting to stay in a brace that's too big for my neck.
The brace guys even said to me in the hospital, "you short neck people always give us a hard time."  So I have a short neck, they don't make smaller braces, so my muscles are straining to fit in a brace that doesn't fit me.
Not any more.
I'm going to do what feels right to do, use a soft brace for support and relax non-stop.

And speaking of Mindy, she's being so super awesome, not only driving me to my doc appointments and stuff, but she's really helping me by cleaning my house.
It's gotten totally away from me over the last few months with all the shoulder pain that started in May and kept up all summer, being put on restrictions, and now the surgery that has even bigger restrictions to not do anything at all, so yeah, my house really needs the cleaning help.
She's going to be starting up her own house cleaning business, so cleaning my mess is giving her a start, I'll happily write a glowing letter of recommendation for her too.
She was only able to tackle my kitchen and bathroom yesterday, but damn, it looks a million times better in those rooms now.
I was so embarrassed about the state of my house, but being on some sort of medical restriction since the middle of May, the most I've been able to do is running the vac, doing the dishes and laundry, and general cleaning of the bathroom, that's it.
There's like 6 inches of dust in this house, and man, I felt so bad yesterday showing her how much my house has escaped me, I'm a clean person, not being able to do any real cleaning has just been a nightmare for my OCD.
So a biggie thank you to Mindy for getting it all back in shape for me, it is so much appreciated.

Ok, need to get back to laying down and relaxing before the nurse gets here to change out my dressings and stuff.