My doctor and I stand in front of the light box, looking at the x-rays of my neck. It's amazing to see what's really inside your body. Most of the time, we don't really think about those little bones that help us to hold our body in different positions.

The doctor explains what the dark and light areas on the x-ray mean. Thankfully, nothing is out of alignment. The pain in my neck is most likely due to an injured back muscle.

So now I'm in physical therapy, getting treatment and learning to do a number of neck stretching exercises. Several times a day, I begin turning my head to the right, then to the left; bending it backward and forward, then tilting my right ear toward my shoulder, and my left ear toward the other shoulder, holding each position for two minutes. And that's just for starters.

The hard part isn't the stretching. It's holding each position for two minutes throughout the day, without looking like I'm staring at my navel, or looking for UFOs in the sky.