Does soaking in hot water help any of your pains, folks with pains? This is the seventh year of dealing with IC, Interstitial cystitis, and I'm more pain free than not, which is awesome. My go-to is always soaking in a hot tub. It's probably burning out cells in my brain like crazy, but it seems to help everything else. Curious if it's anybody else's panacea.

Does soaking in hot water help any of your pains, folks with pains?

I make a circuit through the warm, hot, and cold pools at my local (three blocks away!) lady spa, and then soak for a few hours in the warm pool while I read a book. It helps with a lot of my pain, which is why I finally gave in and bought a yearly membership.

A whirlpool helps with my pain some, but just a regular hot bath doesn't do much. (A whirlpool is on my mental list of things I will get when I am rich enough to own my own house and do renovations. Along with completely remodeling the kitchen so that I can actually reach things.)

Mmm sounds nice. The only places I know where you can do that are Harbin hot springs, which burned down, the Calistoga spa Inn, which changed its policy on day passes, and Breitenbush, way up in the Oregon Cascades between Bend and Salem.

Jackson Wellsprings kind of has that too, the hippie hot spring near Ashland. They don't have a cold pool but their mineral water is warm not hot, and then they have a hot pool that they heat up.

I'm totally into hot tubs and Hot Springs, but baths kind of gross me out. I guess because they're not deep enough or something, they seem inadequate, and then there's the annoyance factor of having to take a shower after you have a bath to wash off skin or dirt or whatever just soaked off your body. The private hot tubs here, it's mandatory to take a shower before you get in them, then I take one after also. Breitenbush dumps their water once a day and replaces it, which is how I got over the squick factor of people not showering before getting into their Pools.

The only thing that's going to get me out of this house is a hot tub, or maybe a movie, or maybe I'll just wait and go to yoga tomorrow morning.

Welcome home, Java! Sounds like mostly a lovely trip. And yeah, the Cat Java will be on your mind a fair bit for a while.

At the lady spa, it is mandatory to shower before going in the pools, and to shower after any scrub or massage service. And I shower after soaking, just so I don't smell like chlorine.

I keep pulling my right shoulder out of joint and feeling something get badly stretched inside. I'm nearly certain that my doctor will say to wear a sling for a while, until the swelling goes down, and then do physical therapy. I really don't want to have my right arm in a sling -- I'm right-handed, and my left hand is completely uncoordinated at doing anything.

Twenty four hours without a muscle relaxant OR pain meds. I even loaded the dishwasher and got that going this morning. Until today, bending over hurt worse than trying to walk.

Between follow-up PT appointments, a therapeutic massage, and my son turning 21, the next three days are going to be short work days. But I feel like I have seriously turned the corner back to human-dom again.

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