Well, this is new! And it's not a cooking recipe.
To be fair I'm not 100% sure that's what's going on, but I'm 99% sure I've acquired 'Intercostal Muscle Strain which is something around that region. It can happen at any age, typically around 20-50 range, and from the comments I read, it was either sports injuries like jujitsu, or banal things like coughing too hard or closing a car door on a windy day... It can also knock you down for up to 8 weeks!
It's terrible.
...an injury to one or more muscles that run between the ribs. The intercostal muscles help to expand and contract the chest during breathing. Strains of these muscles can result in pain and discomfort with breathing, moving, or coughing.
It's like my herniated disks from years back in terms of initial sharp pain feelings and crippling disability. In a way, worse, because for most of yesterday, I couldn't breathe.
Like, I had to sit up at work with shoulders back hard. The moment I relaxed, it would feel like somebody put a sword into my lungs.
I was worried for a while but sufficient research proved to me it was nothing viral or bacterial, and certainly skeletomuscular. Still nasty and painful but survivable.
My commute home was the worst. By the time I got within minutes of my home I was really struggling to breath every breath. I felt it getting worse through the day, and by the time I got to my bed, there was no comfortable position where I could lie down and breathe without agony, except one narrow range of lying on my left shoulder, mostly belly facing down. Any other possible position was suffocating agony.
Naturally the following night was relatively harrowing but I had taken plenty of ibuprofen which got me through, and I started to semi-consciously feel recovery as I managed to lie on my belly, and roll slightly more towards lying on my back over many hours.
By the time I fully woke up - after noon! - I was feeling a bit of pain but relatively sorted. Enough to go for a walk, but with a constant dull pain if I breathed in too much. Then I foolishly did a couple of chores and I regressed back to even worse pain and zero positions of comfort and breathing. Doh.
Interestingly, this pain started to stretch from my lower rib right up to the top of my shoulders and neck, something called referred pain, as it connects the nerves which decide to pass the pain around a bit.
Lying still for ages and more ibuprofen has sorted it out for now.
But damn. I seriously wonder if all my injuries are connected. I'm actually quite confident that they are. I think it all started with my toe in my late 20's and it has had rippling negative effects ever since. Needs some research I reckon!
But yeah I'm doing alright now.
No pain no gain (pretty sure this is the exact context that idiom is used).